From somewhere in the back of my head there was an intent to remove ( stated or not ) circling approaches in favour of runway aligned. Usually the minima is a lot lower than for a circling approach. As for track miles trade off tracking direct to the initial point for the approach from a reasonable distance out. this was also done to provide forced separation and not have everyone tracking over the same point in space at the ARP or NDB.
The initial choice of runway direction was also supposed to address the worst wx situation if air no services could only do an approach for one end.
as for descending on a gps approach to MDA then circling to the other end of the runway may require experience in very low level circuits and not very healthy.
