I am surprised more people haven't pointed this out. It is actually pretty nice, since I can slam in so many more macro keys to my touch bar for actions than the fn keys allowed me to have. Not saying the laptop is the best (I have many annoyances with it too), but I have been able to customize the touch bar for my workflow pretty well. Especially with BetterTouchTool.

Agree. Touchbar is like a re-incarnation of what function keys were originally, when the only people who used computers were programmers who would be writing their own functions for those keys. Of course they fell to disuse. Now they are having new life breathed in to them.

except 1) esc isn't a function key (right? right...?) 2) the buttons are (as one commenter here pointed out) too easy to hit accidentally and to hard to hit intentionally.

I would prefer if esc was left as a physical button. But pleased with where this is going after using it.

I've done this also. I have found it buggy though. About once a day the volume and brightness section stops responding until I do a restart of the machine. I assume this will be fixed in an upcoming update.

BTW if you have the issue with some of the buttons disappearing, killing the agent has worked for me:

/System/Library/CoreServices/ControlStrip.app/Contents/MacOS/TouchBarAgent

I have had the same issue. Buttons seem to just disappear on the touch bar randomly. If you press on them, they reappear again. Definitely some bugs with it.