This almost exactly matches not only my complaints, but the feedback I gave when Google claimed to be interested in such things. Another thing I've observed is

This almost exactly matches not only my complaints, but the feedback I gave when Google claimed to be interested in such things. Another thing I've observed is that non-expert users are utterly confused by the various actions not being visible (though greyed out) when documents are not selected—they simply assume that they will never exist and don't see them after a selection is made. I can't see any way in which the new design is as good as, let alone better than, the old.