This might be a good move, but as someone who does construction design and is pretty consistently in the IBC, I'm hesistant to call it okay. The phrase "these building codes are written in blood" gets tossed around in my office, meaning that these safety codes are probably in place because of accidental deaths that happened.
Edit: I thought about it a bit more, and assuming that this has been properly reconsidered, this really could be a net win. The paranoid in me still likes more points of egress, but I can absolutely see this change happening.