I ignore them because I'm typically trying to do something like right now and those get in my way. How about something more discoverable to begin with? When you hide all of the damn controls behind silly gestures this is what happens.

They give you an intro to everything you asked them to show you, it takes 20 seconds, it’s featured front and center after every upgrade. And if you ignored it because you are trying to do something like right now, you can even go back and look at it again. It’s really pretty handy and nicely produced.

Yet if it's needed only because they continue to change things around and make basic functions more obscure... why is that a good thing?

And I still don't want to spend 20s. You can call that silly, and you're not completely wrong, but watching some stupid iMessage tutorial in my prescious free time isn't exactly something I want to do.

Power users prefer increased functionality over discoverability. Similar to how the command line is foreign to most computer users. For iOS, you're on the "prefer discoverability" side of the spectrum; Apple seems to build more for "prefer advanced/invest time to learn".

Yes, but it doesn't answer why these things had to change and why it is better now.

For me I was always struggled to get the phone to do what I wanted. Either selecting or moving the cursor. It works better for me now. You drag to select, tap to place a cursor, or “pick up” the cursor for more precise placement. i still use the long touch on the spacebar though out of habit. And it’s where my fingers are naturally most of the time when I’m doing stuff with text.

The gestures became more single purpose.

I get it that we like the way things work and when they get changed it’s annoying.

But unless you think the phone has reached the perfect interface with no room for improvement, you should continue to expect things to change.

If you do think it’s perfect, well, good for you. Stop upgrading, and you will at least have a few years of stability.

A steering wheel is not the optimal steering device since we have cars with power steering, but changing that would make necessary for everyone to adapt to their vehicles again and would result in many accidents and many deaths.

Evolution is good, but the right pace is not always the fastest one. It can of course be faster for phone UIs than car UIs, but every change is still a potential hassle for all your users and should be carefully considered even if it is, objectively speaking, an improvement.