Adding this mode alone is very useful and should help some users work with their data quite nicely. So I'm really glad to see progress. UI people have a lot of concerns to make sure that even though there are a LOT of changes coming in the new interface, that consistency doesn't suffer. Interfaces can be well below the perfectionist interface-geeks standards and still be usable, heck look at Windows. Despite Windows being complete garbage when it comes to interface and consistency, it is still quite usable for a lot of people.
Humans adapt to bad interface all too readily.