The problems most people have are finding places and ways to get to those places. All the changes I outlined, including continuing improvements to their directions, served that purpose for quite a while. Reviews, the commercial areas highlighting and local guides helps find shopping and food spots and I used this extensively during multiple trips with great success. Same with the transit directions and landmarks highlighting and I fail to see any reason how these made maps worse. I cannot possibly think of why adding bus and rail timings made maps worse. They are incredible features. Things I didn't originally include are also traffic conditions and suggesting routes based on that by factoring in timing which is somewhat hit or miss but still leaning towards hit in my experience
I can point specifically to things like their new Business Messaging, the ramped up difficulty to contributions and reducing them primarily to photos and reviews, and the new experimental color schemes as decidedly worse changes