Categories

Reading Dave's blog post, looking at his screenshots and all the new features regarding the sidebar (including collections) it's quite clear that you shifted the focus from individual users to enterprise users.

We made this change based in part on feedback from individual users.

All explanations I've seen so far emphasize how good the change fits to users with lots of accounts and vaults.

In a previous thread here, @danvpeterson covered some of the reasons for this new design:

As discussed in that post, the previous sidebar had a ton of it's own issues and was a fairly consistent source of confusion for a lot of folks ever since the release of 1Password 7. This change was our attempt to remedy that and make it simpler and easier to understand how our vaults, tags, and categories work. In most of our user testing so far it was regarded very well overall, but obviously some of you disagree and we will take that into account.

roustem also noted here:

The sidebar in 1Password 7 has problems. It is overloaded, it does too much. There are two different states that present different information (vaults vs categories) and this is confusing, especially to new users. Even I got lost a quite a few times trying to use the sidebar.

We also do frequently correspond with individual customers who use more than just a couple vaults, and who find that method of organization useful. While we're not done iterating on this, and there might be ways the layout can be made more flexible (as you mentioned!), there was serious design thinking that went into this decision - it's not a matter of "we decided: yay corporations."

I hope this provides a useful overview of our thinking so far - and we do hope to impress you as we continue to make improvements going forward!