I find it laudable you're openly admitting making users unhappy.

Of course, what's "added" and what's "simple" is a political value choice in an of itself.

Using a mailing list for comments sounds like "returning to the golden days when we didn't need to take non-techies people seriously but could tell them what to use their cognitive capacity for" i.e. to learn arcane UI that never even tried to really take into account all the learnings of Human-computer interaction about how learning and cognition works.

It really doesn't sound like there's been an actual critical discussion taking into account the needs of a substantial array of potential users. Instead the design seems like a reactive wish to return to olden days.

Which is okay of course, just how it's presentes seems skewed in a very particular way.