I got the email too, and my sense is that your optimism is justified. If they've sent out rejections, the readers must already have evaluated our projects and assigned them numeric scores, and the committee must have established a cut-off score for funding. They can't possibly be re-evaluating our projects at this point, which means that they're just making sure that everything is clear with our budgets. My guess is that the change in wording was at the advice of the W-G's lawyers--if they do end up not funding someone, either because they already have the money they need or because they need more money than they've asked the W-G for, they don't want to be legally liable.
That said, I wish they would end the suspense and send something more concrete!
