Exactly. Well said, @antonis. Every time I hear the phrase “make it more modern,” I just assume it to mean “remove a lot of useful settings, or bury them under endless sub-menus, reduce font contrast to pale gray on even paler gray, and inject a lot of blank space around everything… you know… make it look nice for phone screens.”
Although I do understand the developers’ reasoning for rebuilding the code. What would have been nice is if they could have made the new layout a setting that users could enable themselves, to “check out the new look,” or disable to keep the UI as it was. But maybe it wasn’t possible to keep everything as it was, given the new code. 
They did say they were going to try to approximate the former look and functionality, so I don’t know how some of those jarring design changes made it into the mix. 