However once you realize that you can add new gestures without having to defend adding a physical or screen real estate button, it takes a lot of discipline to avoid adding more. I like to think that Steve would have told most of their people to fuck off and we’d have one or two new gestures now, instead of twice as many. They would have found some other way.
For me personally a similar thing was when Ableton Live transitioned from having a more "direct" interface to having popup menus for absolutely everything, and it took time for me to adapt to it for live performances. To be fair I never really adapted and just moved to something else.
Rather than coming up with creative solutions like they did before they just kept adding things to those popup menus. The app went from magic (by enabling me to perform live effortlessly) to frankly difficult (by having the interface become difficult to memorize and getting in my way).
Coincidentally was when they also started racking up bugs so much that they needed a couple years without new features just to clean up bugs.
If you’re doing something like a sound mixer you should be able to move more things to a second screen. Run the main app on your new tablet and the ancillary functions on your old one. Or a small monitor if it’s view only.
My usage of Live was just hosting VSTs plus augmenting the band's sound, while retaining the ability to improvise.
Today I use Mainstage, which has no pretensions of becoming a production app, so I guess it will remain simple.
Mind you in the early days pages used to have hundreds if not thousands of text links all over the place, the only sites that do this now are the hardcore conspiracy sites where the author just adds several new links a day.
So in this dimension at least web UIs have changed for the better.
It’s almost like your aunt and uncle who always bicker at family reunions. Keep that drama shit out of public spaces.