The real problem is that not all clients supports beamforming. (I mean, in Classic Cisco APs there where, as far as I remember, some proprietary beamforming tech that would give older clients without beamforming support a better signal, but I dont thinks that is around anymore - ClientLink was its name, now I remember - Introduced in 1142 APs , thats what my brain is telling me). Standard based beamforming been around since 802.11n, but not all "n" clients supported it. I think it is required to be supported on .ac and beyond. But the client has to send "sounding" frames to the AP in order for it to work. Now, if your client supports this, and the AP CAN actually use all 4 antennas for the beamforming, well then, in theory, you would get the added benefit of a 6db better signal. For all clients that do not support this however, they will have to live with a much smaller cell size. And that is my main issue with this. There are so many unanswered questions here. But Im pretty sure that the AP will not "go back", as you call it, (at least not the way it is now) in transmit power, because they already include that (perhaps possible) beamforming in their max EIRP setting at this time, no matter client support. But yeah. Its bad.
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