Yes Archtypes aren't classes, that still holds true in priority, it is a game design question.
When you have to spend a significant portion of your resources to do one thing, which locks out many other paths for secondary roles and in effect locks you into a single role in the party, then yes, it is effectively a class system. Part of what 4E did best was that point buy allowed you to make hybrids, or people who could cover multiple roles. Deckers who could also rig, for instance, or a rigger who could sling a bit of code if they had to. This was a good thing, as the average group for any RPG is 4-6 people, and in SR, you have a lot of roles that need to be covered. It allowed for redundancy, if nothing else, which was useful for when the party got split or someone got tagged and you had to finish the run without them. Did you see a decrease in 'pure' deckers who did nothing but sling code in the Matrix? Yes. And that was because they were finally free to DO more. Eliminating the insanely expensive decks and rigs broke those
de facto classes into ACTUAL archetypes, much like with the Street Samurai, Combat Mage, or Face.
Priority is generally considered useful to lower the barrier to entry. New players given a pile of points and no guide have no idea what to do are are gonna get lost. I don't have an issue with point buy it's fine, i think 5th karma total is on the stingie side of things, but I certainly agree you can make a character using it.
Training wheels on your bicycle and bumpers on the lanes at the bowling alley lower the barrier to entry, but there's a reason why they aren't the primary or default way of doing things. And honestly, the 'new people will get lost' argument is crap, because new people will get lost, regardless of the system. That's why good GMs either walk a player through making their first character, or give them a pregen that they can modify until they get their feet under them. That's true for every system I've played, which includes three editions of D&D, three editions of M&M, two editions of SR, three editions of HERO, two editions of BESM, Cortex System, Heroes Unlimited, GURPS, and the FASERIP of MSHRPG. Throw a kid into the deep end of the pool, and they're not going to know what to do. But that doesn't mean you make the pool 2' deep.
I'm not sold that it's step back in game design, parts of the system are solid, others that are weak. The good news is, 5th is still a work in progress and the system is still developing.
The parts of the system that are solid are the ones they didn't fuck with, and unfortunately, those include a lot of sacred cows that should have been made into steaks a long time ago, like the scaling karma costs. Priority is a step backward, just like if you put training wheels on your bike after you've been riding for years. The return of forcing people into what are classes in fact, if not name, is a huge step backwards for a supposedly classless system. The loss of many customization options (weapon and vehicle mods, spell creation rules, etc.) is a step backwards.
And frankly, saying it is a WIP and still developing is NOT good news. WIP is something you use BEFORE shit gets printed, not use as an excuse two years in. Don't get me wrong, I know there will be mistakes. That's what errata is for. But when massive sections of the game make demon rat drek look good in comparison, that means you should have fixed that shit BEFORE printing, or at the very least unfuck that mess quicker than they have. The Matrix in general (and TMs in particular) don't need a patch job. They need a ground up rewrite.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they kept trying to hide behind 5th being a 'work in progress' and 'still developing' when 6th edition rolls out. Hell, even D&D 4th did a better job at being a working system before they launched.