I can't imagine why Apple has not been able to improve on the computer's specifications for serious professional engineer use in five years. The CPU increase and GPU increase is unimpressive. (Why no quad core in 13"?) Retina is fantastic, but not a substitute for proper amounts of memory. The only major improvement is the awesome bandwidth of the 1T SSD in the new models.
I use the F-keys extensively in my workflow. I could barely even reliably hit the ESC key at the Apple Store when testing vi. The keyboard was also atrocious, but I would probably adjust if it had F-keys.
The bottom line is this is just not a useful laptop for me. Super sad, cause I would have liked a top-of-the-line computer. I am going to get an Alienware 13R3 or Razer Blade instead. Sorry, Apple, you've taken too long to put out a reasonable professional laptop.
Yes, RAM-wise applications become more bloated due to containers, VMs, and the (ab)use of JS-based applications or 'apps'.
Take into account I am typing this on a MBP from 2010, 6 years old, which shipped with 4 GB RAM which I was able to upgrade easily to 8 GB RAM, with a 256 GB SSD which I put in myself after updating from a 512 GB 5400 RPM HDD.
By some (certainly not everyone) MBPs are bought to be an investment of several years, yet MBPs are no longer 'pimpable'. You can't upgrade their internals anymore. So what happens? People buy them with higher specs than they need. Which means a bigger or quicker SSD, and bigger or quicker RAM.
Which brings me to the following point: the MBP used to be a relatively bulky laptop/notebook, but a beast. A compact, less powerful version was the Macbook Air which as the name suggests was also lighter. At best, it has shifted. At worst, this is no longer the case. Because the MBP is designed to be light itself.
Finally, the battery. If it is already bad with 5 hours out of the box, this can be improved perhaps via software. Who knows? That is the risk of buying. You don't wanna take that risk. A product as expensive as this one needs to have high uptime out of the box. Plus, the battery will degrade over time as well, and Apple products haven't been known to have easily replaceable battery (compare to Dell XPS).
Now, the problem with all of the above points is that they're all made so that the MBP -supposedly the powerhorse of notebooks/laptops of Apple- is smaller and weights less. Whereas they had the Macbook Air line for that purpose before. It just doesn't make sense from a customer PoV to pay more for less!
You see, those who'd like to buy a device for years to come don't mind the USB-C debacle that much. Because in x years, it'll be everywhere (lets assume x=2 for the sake of argument, while the device is being used for 5 years and even if the device isn't used for 5 years it has resale value!).