The price bump is the thing that puts me off the most.

And while the change to USB-C is a step forward did they really need to completely abandon Thunderbolt 2 ports, couldn't they have had a transition with at least one port on the new MBPs?

Yeh I know it's not Apple's way, but forcing to discard a bunch of perfectly usable dongles and buy a new set isn't very customer friendly and that's before asking the question of why do I need to even buy $100 of dongles to connect a $2000 laptop to my keyboard, monitor, network etc.