Personally I quite like the settings change, perhaps I didn't spend enough time with the old one but it felt rather clunky/disorganised to me. Whereas now they're roughly approximate between devices there's less for me to remember. I'd agree no one expects a computer to work the same as a phone/tablet, however when it comes to such basic things as settings having the same interface and syncing things where it makes sense is a positive for me
Also, if you can distance yourself from the visual changes, you'll notice there are far more customization than there have ever been.
The fact that I can remap caps lock more easily than on a Linux machine, for example, blows my mind. Window tiling also works out of the box with 3rd party apps. Meanwhile, Ubuntu switching to GNOME broke Compiz settings that many used for those features.
Poster won't know how good he has it until he switches to something else.
Also, if macOS and iOS converge into appleOS, won't that mean we finally get a MacBook we can touch and hack?
Depending on your view of things, everything on Linux is a "third party app" ;)
On macOS there's a crude one: hover over the green stoplight, and you get first party tiling (via fullscreen), press alt and you get snapping. I do wish the latter would get default shortcuts though (which you can set up yourself in the keyboard shortcut settings). The only reason I install Moom is that it supports mouse snapping, because the 1st party one + MC covers 98% of my tiling use cases.
To each his own, and I do use i3 on Linux, but I found that attempting to set up such "true tiling" ways results in much kludginess on macOS, the same way that attempting to make Linux mimic macOS largely fails. It's a bit like importing vim keybindings in various apps: you could only pry vim from my cold dead hands but for me the approximation of vim is worse than no vim in apps that are not vim, it just constantly trips me up. Therefore, I choose to use each tool for its strengths, and accept its failings.
My point is that "out of the box" and "with a third-party app" are at odds with each other. OOTB means OOTB, nothing else - i.e. in this scenario that phrase can be left out because it's incorrect.
