I agree with most of what you said, but I disagree that forcing change to drive long-term improvements is a good idea. There seems to be a trend to making UIs

I agree with most of what you said, but I disagree that forcing change to drive long-term improvements is a good idea. There seems to be a trend to making UIs less configurable and more "consistent" with the app designer's presumptions about how a UI should work. But does this justify sweeping away well-established UI conventions for something new and untested? If you make the new UI a configurable option, one of three things will happen: 1. People will gradually discover the new UI option, try it out, and if it genuinely does improve their workflow, keep using it in the long term. In this scenario, your improvement will gradually displace the old convention, and you will eventually reach a point at which old convention can be retired. 2. Some people will adopt the new design, but many will continue to prefer the old convention. Here, there is no objective superiority of one solution to the other, and the best direction is to let it remain a configurable option. 3. Adoption of the new feature will be negligible. This might be because the established convention is in fact superior, but it might also be attributable to user simply having entrenched habits. Either way, it implies that the new solution does not have enough of an advantage over the old to overcome what users are accustomed to, and that the established convention is good enough. In this case, you should acknowledge that the change was unnecessary and revert back to the old convention. This approach allows for UIs to evolve to suit actual usage preferences, and avoids the pitfalls of constantly changing everything in pursuit of an abstract and prescriptive notion of consistency.