Am I the only one who prefers version 7?

Probably the explanation is "it's prettier". Every once in a while a design team announces a product is stale or old and needs to be updated to a "modern" design. But, as designers, they may be more focused on how it looks than how it works; or they may decide that some new ideas on how things "should" work are wonderful and they would make the product "better". And this is what we get. Stuff just doesn't work anymore either because they compromised on features to get the new pretty stuff out the door and chopped functionality, or they just don't care enough about their existing customer base that they find it ok to force people to their vision. What is frustrating to me is they get away with this crap because at its core 1P is an excellent product. But, they are spending NPS to satisfy their designers.