My big complaint is with the transition of controls from dedicated, tactile knobs, switches, and levers to touch-screen buttons or menus which demand more visual attention (i.e. distraction from driving) to operate.
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...
Like you said, the infotainment is also not a touchscreen and is rotary control only. While not as immediately intuitive as a touchscreen, once you get the hang of it it is much safer and more accurate to use while driving. Trying to use a touchscreen while moving is just awful.
And I don't think it is wise to optimize short term intuitiveness over long term safety and usability for a vehicle I will own for several years.
You can make a modern electric vehicle with actual buttons and dials. There is nothing about a car not having a gas motor that requires every tiny bit of functionality being controlled by a touch tablet. If anything it just seems like laziness in car design.
I'm with you and hope all the idiot touch screen crap is ditched.
I agree many manufacturers have gone a bit overboard in making even things like vent positions and glove boxes behind touchscreens. But at the same time, I don't want touch screen to completely disappear. Punching in a destination and controlling the navigation interface is way better with a touchscreen than using a dial. As a passenger or while stopped, changing the media with a touchscreen interface is better than a dial. Changing a lot of the finer settings in the car (ones you wouldn't be doing while driving) with a touchscreen is better than scrolling through menus with a dial. For the most part, a lot of things you'd do with the system while not moving or while being the passenger can be better on the screen than with a bunch of physical controls, controls which would necessitate making the screen a lot smaller.
Also, then when wanting to quickly reference the navigation system, having a larger screen with larger items on it means it is easier to understand what it is telling the driver in a glance. Having a ton of physical controls means it is a much smaller map, meaning smaller items on the map, meaning harder to understand at a quick glance. It's nice having the next turn up in the driver's information cluster or on a heads-up display as well to reduce the needs for the driver to reference the larger navigation system.
There definitely needs to be a balance of physical controls versus software buttons, but I wouldn't buy a new car without a screen these days.