That's disappointing, but I'm glad that it's not just something unique to my phone.

I wonder what changed. I don't really know enough (or anything!) about the differences between the hardware and software encoders to speculate..

Hopefully someone with a deeper technical knowledge will look into this since in lieu of RAW output, 100% JPEGs were the next best thing (not that I'm noticing any truly terrible JPEG artifacts on the photos without it.. the worst of the artifacting is caused by the sharpening applied by the camera software, IMO).