"We finally landed on the forms you see below. These icons are bright and bold. We love this and pushed it as hard as we could. If you see just one or two, they stick out a bit, but when lined up chromatically (as so many of us like to do), they own the dock… or any other context."
Owning the dock shouldn't have been the goal. They should have a nice, non-distracting icon that tells me which program is which.
"Legible. Application icons should be distinguishable from one another at small icon sizes, on file icons, and in the OS. Icons must be differentiable beyond color and should be legible for color blind persons via shape, letter-forms, tone, or other method."
They sure didn't meet that stated goal. I guess I'll be copying over the icon from Illustrator 10 yet again...
I do like the new look (especially the splash screens), although I rarely use any of the programs anymore. But if I were responsible for the branding, I would have looked at the most common combinations of programs as distinct sets and picked colors that way. The entirety of the suite package only makes sense to look at as a single entity to Adobe... a user who has Dreamweaver installed is unlikely to also have AfterEffects, and so on.
But I think the departure from the solid colored blocks towards the colored strokes and text is the wrong way to go because of how much more subtle it is.