On slower hardware it goes like thus: Start maps, wait for all the bloat, dismiss the pointless bloat you just waited for, do this two or three times for the GUI to catch up. Now you have slow maps! A truly horrendous experience!
On fast hardware the UI is still very bloated but sure it works, it just isn't pleasant to use.
They should fork it, one clean version and one tourist version. But I guess the changes have not been to make maps better, it has been to sell more ads. So now when those two incentives are the on collision course we will never see a good maps application from Google anymore.
Regardless I agree with your sentiment. I'm betting we'll come full circle at some point - or else they'll lose their maps users to some equivelant of duckduckgo.