A lot of people on that thread were very specific in their feedback. Both pointing out their grouses and what could be done to fix them, so I disagree with your unkind characterization that they were just a 'few people who don't like change'
The least Skype could have done was post a simple
"Thank you for the posts, we are evaluating all your feedback"
Too much to ask?
Grandparent: There might be all sorts of good intentions, criticism and suggestions in the thread, but if you start out with "new skype = FAIL", well, you're going to have a hard time framing that as constructive.
First of all, what does the barely 3d cover-flow view of my contacts suppose to help me with? Even if I maximize it to screen-size, I can only see 9 contacts (1 fully, 8 partially) at once, and they are all resampling of Icons of what 128x128 pixels? Form and function FAIL.
Second, what happened to conversation history? If I click show 6 months, I can't go back to show 1 day. Dead end workflows are always awkward.
Lastly, why in the world is there so much spacing? There's like 100px of completely blank paddings everywhere. The icons and fonts are already ginormous. Making the window so much bigger doesn't make me more likely to use it.
The UI design makes no sense whatsoever. It must have been done by an automatic random UI design decision maker.
Disagree. The UI reflects how I've seen most people use Skype (and other IM applications, iChat, Adium, MSN, …): always keep the conversation window open with all the contacts you usually chat with; ignore the contacts list.
With Skype 5 for Mac, I haven’t heard a single soul say anything positive about it.
Skype is an indispensable tool for a lot of people, including me. All I want is it to get better. But Skype 5 doesn't really look like a step in that direction.
But the outrageous tantrums being thrown on this thread are just ridiculous and counter productive. I doubt they were even cathartic from the poster's end.
Thankfully the newest beta makes sure that when you flip back to Skype the text input is always the active UI element in your chat (as opposed to the title for whatever god awful reason).
The UI still takes up a huge amount of space, but it is at least usable now.
Not being able to tear video out into a separate window is still very frustrating however.
However, note that the first post in that thread was Nov 4, 2010. That's over three months ago. By this time, they definitely should have at least posted something indicating they've heard the user response.