I guess I should also throw out what is going on with it...
try_files is a fast way to do an if statement if the files exist. First, it will try to see if that path exists as a file ($uri), then see if it is a directory ($uri/) then it will internally redirect it to run as index.php?fullpath which is what the url was doing with index.php in it, but we are just making it go away. You can add other things too, and this is MUCH faster than if statements in the location section. If you can get away with it, never use if statements in the nginx configuration where it will be parsed for every connection. It would slow it down to apache levels