Hi Michael,
No such changes in the datasource's behavior have been documented. Here's a
link to the Hierarchical datasource change event documentation. Could you demonstrate the difference you see between version 2014.2.716 and 2017.1.223 with regard to the conditions under which the event fires? Here's a sample
dojo in which we log to the console every time the event fires (for example when expanding a node). At my end I do not see any different behavior when changing the loaded Kendo UI files version from the older one to the latest official.
Regards,
Ivan Danchev
Telerik by Progress