In the past, crouch would effectively be instantaneous; you press pg down, you squat, you let go, you get back up, with no delay. You could tap pg down to make your avatar do this little jig, and if you tap it fast enough, there'd be practically no visual indicator at all, especially if you're wearing an animation override.

All of which was actually rather useful for some fun interactions, including some I've scripted myself, which is then why it's so annoying that for some reason, this behaviour appears to have changed. Now if you tap pg down, you crouch for a whole second before getting back up, which does ruin some of those gadgets where it's supposed to be invisible or at least instantaneous so you could do it quickly in a rapid succession.

I'm at least assuming this change in behaviour isn't intentional, because this only happens while you're standing still; if you're in the middle of another animation (walking, turning) or even in the middle of transitioning from any of those other states to standing, it still demonstrates the classic behaviour.