The experience of a new user in your app can turn out to be a pretty critical moment when it comes to retention. Having a flow specifically for new users is common and does the job of easing them into whatever necessary complexity exists in your default state.

It doesn't have to be one or the other; include a small switch at the bottom of the screen that alternates between the two representations.

Maintaining one consistent front-end is obnoxious enough from my biased personal experience with the UI/design aspect of building a web app... but I agree that it's probably a weak point that they offer so many disparate options but they are probably just gathering data with what works/what doesn't. Just guessing. I would imagine that eventually we'll see some (more? I don't know if its happened already) closures of the individual Uber product lines