I just got to use the Books app in Catalina and I find it almost unusable for my audiobooks. Smart lists are gone, I can't figure out how to jump to specific track, I can't find find my files in Finder anymore.
Makes me wonder why they destroyed a perfectly OK software by dumbing it down to making it pretty much useless. What are the people that make these decisions thinking?
I honestly want to know. It doesn't make sense to put effort into a rebuild only to make something less useful.
But this isn't the case; good design doesn't mean 'remove every feature except maybe three of them', nor does it mean 'hide features under layers of menus in case they scare newcomers'. It means to make the software easy to understand at a glance, and to make it so people with different use cases can get doing done.
We see the same trend in website design too. An assumption that good design means 'barely anything on screen at any one time'.
So yeah, it's due to a UX misunderstanding,