Telling us we aren't listening seems unfair too.

There's probably a reason people are doing that though.

Over the years we've had a rough history of ignoring user feedback and leaving projects half-finished.

Ah, there it is. Not much to do about that instead of doing it better now. Improvement will be noticed, but trust goes faster away than it returns. It takes time. A lot of it.

What we could do, is look more at the bright side of things. I for one am glad the base of design is getting more generic. Why? Because I remember the graduation of Code Review.

The graduation of Code Review was messy (read the full story here). The community had just about died before it rose from the ashes. Then it almost died again and... oh well, you get the point.

What I wanted to say was eventually the site graduated. Without a design. Because the backlog for the designers was so huge it took way over 6-8 weeks to get it done. The announcement for graduation was in 2014, the design went live in 2015. 61 weeks later. It took so long there was talk about design independent graduation (graduate now, get your design, colours and everything else indicating you're actually graduated later). That showed us how complicated the process of graduating was at Stack Exchange.

Anything and everything speeding up that needlessly long process is essentially a good thing. Sure, there are a couple of side effects to changes. But the intention to fix the design problem is great. This improvement is something some of us have been waiting for, for years. Literally.

Well done.

Telling us we aren't listening seems unfair too.

There's probably a reason people are doing that though.

Over the years we've had a rough history of ignoring user feedback and leaving projects half-finished.

Ah, there it is. Not much to do about that except doing it better now. Improvement will be noticed, but trust goes faster away than it returns. It takes time. A lot of it.

What we could do, is look more at the bright side of things. I for one am glad the base of design is getting more generic. Why? Because I remember the graduation of Code Review.

The graduation of Code Review was messy (read the full story here). The community had just about died before it rose from the ashes. Then it almost died again and... oh well, you get the point.

What I wanted to say was eventually the site graduated. Without a design. Because the backlog for the designers was so huge it took way over 6-8 weeks to get it done. The announcement for graduation was in 2014, the design went live in 2015. 61 weeks later. It took so long there was talk about design independent graduation (graduate now, get your design, colours and everything else indicating you're actually graduated later). That showed us how complicated the process of graduating was at Stack Exchange.

Anything and everything speeding up that needlessly long process is essentially a good thing. Sure, there are a couple of side effects to changes. But the intention to fix the design problem is great. This improvement is something some of us have been waiting for, for years. Literally.

Well done.