I swear Outlook peaked with Outlook 2003 and has just kept getting worse since then.

New Outlook is just atrocious from a design perspective IMO. Everything is flat, and the panels all blend into each other. All the emails subjects run right into the next.

On top of that it just wastes so much space. It's offensive how they manage to both waste space and still have things right up against each other blurring the lines of emails.

Besides Edge and ads everywhere in windows, I think the complete mishmash of design styles and general "unpolished" feel of their apps are really making me wonder why even use Windows. I don't want to fight my software just to use it.

I tried the Outlook, and vs the Mail it seemed like an unnecessary complication.

No. It is terrible, a webview around the shitty outlook.com web UI, which is cluttered, inconvenient, and often buggy, especially when rich text editing is needed. Also the Bcc field is hidden and needs some weird incantations to display the field. A steming platform, as it can be read in the emails.

Outlook Express was almost peak outlook usability, and is on the decline ever since. More useless features, and ever worse GUI.