> I don't understand why we had to lose the old disk utility GUI. The new one is so underpowered and buggy that you need to use shell commands to get anything done.

I see it the other way as I'll use a shell command by default over a GUI program because it's usually far easier. Typically the GUI programs are the baby ones for the most common cases. But as you add more and more options, the chance for the user to fail to understand what's going on (even the sophisticated user when the number of features shoots way up -- think of MS Word) increases non-linearly.

So in this case: most Apple users buy mass market packaged disks already formatted for Windows, which are easily recognized and reformatted for the Mac. Frankly this distinction here is great: if you bought a bare drive you probably know what you want to do.

FWIW I'm a Mac user myself, though as noted above most of my usage is in the Terminal.