Funnily enough, my experience was the opposite. I spent a while playing with Blender 2.49, and although its UI wasn't the most intuitive, at least I could use the menus to get a feel for what functionality was available. This new unified drop-down has the effect of grouping commands by textual similarity instead of conceptual similarity, which is much less useful. Even if you know what action you want to take, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do it unless you know exactly how Blender spells it.