I apologize for not expanding my view with a detailed analysis, but damn.
The update you guys promoted like half a year in advance made it even worse.
There is a probably a bimodal distribution on happiness, but they only optimize for the bigger curve instead of both, to reduce complexity. So while you, and an advanced user, might want a lot of advanced features, those same features scare away the majority of casual users. So it's a business decision to cater to the majority at the expense of the minority to reduce overall development cost.
The most annoying thing maybe is that I can't hide stuff from the lists. Like when I watch 2 minutes of something and decides that I will never ever watch that crap again - that piece of crap will forever haunt my interface.
After a while I started to think maybe they aren't optimizing for what we might expect.
By providing a UI that makes it slightly harder to find shows, displays as few shows at a time as possible and one that lures you into watching whatever is on the screen at the moment (even if just for a minute) they are effectively increasing the value of each piece of content and increasing the odds that you will watch whatever is on the screen while at the same time decreasing the odds that you will fall into choice paralysis.
This also might make it seem like they have more new/relevant content than they really do.
I'm not really well versed in this area, but I'd love to see an analysis of this hypothesis by someone who is more competent in this kind of design.
Was in the car with my fitness obsessed gf, she'd never heard of pizza rolls. I said "Tontinos pizza rolls" near the device (potentially googled it but I doubt it) on her iPhone 6. Hulu from the device when we got back from car ride. First advert, Tontinos...
Despicable.
It's a pretty awesome feature.