Why was 1P8 released in a seemingly unfinished state?

1Password, like most software developers, have probably switched to an 'Agile' method of development, as opposed to the old 'Waterfall' method. Very (very) loose and rough differences are: waterfall looks to spec everything out and build out large produts or featues in a big bang relaese. Very crudely, this assumes your product feature set and dev resources are fixed, and things are released when they are released. This asssumes your customers will stick around.

With Agile development, the assumption is that you have fixed time to deliver stuff. So, complete rewrites (like 1P8) are done with a view to deliver the minimum viable feature set within that timeline, i.e. the minimum amount to make it usable (or not completely piss their millions of users off).

This does mean a more predictable cadence to new releases, and I have no doubt many of the features may come back as people vote with their displeasure (here for instance) so that they get prioritsed appropriately. Many missing features may already be on the backlog of features they want to implement in the new platform.

I am fine with all these, and have faith that 1pw will continue to evolve in a positive way. I am not a fan of the we know best and taking away security options (e.g. taking away options of when the master pw is required), or indeed, introduce severe https://1password.community/discussion/132299/security-regressions-in-1password-8-for-ios.