[Galaxy Note 4 General] BarryH_GEG:
There are two aspects to TW - 1) the aesthetic, and 2) the functionality it provides.

Let's talk about them...

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Most people bashing TW (or pretty much any OEM overlay) are comparing it to a Nexus device or AOSP. Google's mastery of UX/UI design has improved but benchmarked against "good" UX/UI design Android L is probably a 7 on the 10 scale. Their apps diverge from each other functionally and aesthetically, popular apps get the most attention leaving them ahead of the rest design wise, and they aren't terribly well integrated. Most of them are needlessly busy (Music and Play) or barren and hard to figure out (Voice). Making all that "flat" isn't really going to change anything. As for the appearance of TW I don't think it's any worse than native Android. Starting with the SGS5 Samsung's made an effort to make the UI more contemporary, their proprietary apps more consistent, and all of it thinner and less busy. Most people who hate TW do so because it's not AOSP, not that it's bad in and of itself.

I

love

the functionality Samsung's added to Android and am actually a

heavy

S Pen and productivity user. Most of the stuff I love the most I never see mentioned on XDA; probably because most people here aren't productivity users or primarily use their devices for consumption. For the latter group I totally get why they'd hate OEM overlays and can see why the simplicity of using everything provided "as-is" by Google would be attractive. To an extent, and it's kind of ironic, that's what Apple device users see as a benefit in iOS too. Everything's handed to you and you only have to go another route if you want to.

Here's what I use most in TW. And I mean every day.

Multiview (drag and drop between windows, Pen Window allowing apps to be overlayed or minimized)

Scrapbook (capturing and categorizing things I stumble upon, capturing something on one device and having it available on another)

Persistent clipboard (anything you copy is saved for use across apps even after a restart)

S Note (brainstorming, handwriting-to-text for meeting notes, syncing and editing between devices, creating S Notes on my PC and sending them to my devices and vice-versa)

My Files (FTP & Dropbox integration especially, saving to external storage which Google f-d up)

Editable screen captures with S Pen

Action Memo

S Voice driving mode (to send and listen to MMS, control the device without touching it [Hi Galaxy])

Stock browser (being able to sync across my mobile devices, sending an open page between my tablet and phone)

Samsung Link (moving content between devices (N3, N10.1-14, Gear, home PC, home server, work PC, Dropbox, multiple Samsung TVs, saving directly to external storage which Google f-d up)

Pop-up-play (I like to watch HBO GO, Amazon, Hulu, and TBS while I'm working on gnarly projects)

Hancom Office (the best faux-Office product out of a bad lot)

E-Meeting (I'll hand someone my tablet and work the presentation from my N3; impresses every time)

SideSync

WatchOn

Milk (love it, even once I have to start paying for it)

Nokia Here (absolutely fantastic - it's lightweight like Google Maps but doesn't bombard you with advertising or capture your user data, soon to be available on your wrist too)

Samsung's BT HID implementation (using a mouse and a Samsung keyboard is as close to using a PC as you'll ever get on Android)

The most legitimate ***** about TW is the amount of resources it consumes. But there's a caveat. If you're a consumption user and could care less about the stuff I've shared my use of then yes, TW is wasting resources and keeps a slew of processes and threads open in the background that you'll never use. But, and it's a big but, if you were using a Nexus device and wanted to replicate all the stuff I listed and downloaded third party apps (where they exist) from Play you'd be using as many or more resources and everything would be far less integrated.

So like most of the stuff discussed on XDA TW isn't black and white and people's individual views of AOSP vs. what OEM's do to Android is a huge YMMV. How you think about it depends on how you use your device. To each their own. ;)