Ha! Same for me. Even hated the news of them buying Fireworks... good insight as they eventually killed it.
But once you learn the keyboard shortcuts and start to think in terms of "what group of things would I want to manipulate / apply the same effect / transformation, to all at the same time" instead of "how things make logical sense to be grouped together", and also "what tasks are more common for real-life professionals using this program" instead of "where would that option make sense to be based on what it actually does".
There are 2 UX/I games to play: (1) improve the UXI for current professional users that you know will pay for your product, and rely on professional network effects for growth, and (2) improve the UXI for new users, optimizing for adoptions, but accept that lots of the new users will never be "professional" users, will never pay a lot of money for it, and some of their feature requests will be expensive to develop but will result in no increased profit.
Hint: Adobe is obviously playing game #1 and they are also slaves to their past mistakes, and on top of that their current user base includes a huge number of "artsy, not so logical, and profoundly change-averse" users. Hence all their products can only induce rage and/or mind-numbness in people like us :)
1) the undo buffer only undoes actions against the media. The application UI has just as much or more state in it. I need undo to also work against settings and UI placement.
2) they expose way too much. The feature set that is visible isn't tuned to the needs of most users. Almost everyone needs to constantly dig through menus. The UI should be task specific and configurable on a per project basis.
But once you learn the keyboard shortcuts and start to think in terms of "what group of things would I want to manipulate / apply the same effect / transformation, to all at the same time" instead of "how things make logical sense to be grouped together", and also "what tasks are more common for real-life professionals using this program" instead of "where would that option make sense to be based on what it actually does".
There are 2 UX/I games to play: (1) improve the UXI for current professional users that you know will pay for your product, and rely on professional network effects for growth, and (2) improve the UXI for new users, optimizing for adoptions, but accept that lots of the new users will never be "professional" users, will never pay a lot of money for it, and some of their feature requests will be expensive to develop but will result in no increased profit.
Hint: Adobe is obviously playing game #1 and they are also slaves to their past mistakes, and on top of that their current user base includes a huge number of "artsy, not so logical, and profoundly change-averse" users. Hence all their products can only induce rage and/or mind-numbness in people like us :)