So there are a couple of glaring problems:

1. The keyboard. Ugh. The keyboard was ostensibly changed to shave half a millimeter off the thickness of an MBP. 0.5mm. The old chiclet keyboard was fine. The new one is basically worse in every way. It's louder, feels crappier to type on, has a high failure rate (as witnessed by Apple's free repair program) and is otherwise expensive to replace. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about the keyboard; and

2. The touch bar. This was is more mixed. The big problem is you don't have an option for not having it and Apple's reason for adding it is simply to raise the ASP (average selling price) of Mac SKUs. That's it. The old Macbook Air was too successful. Many people object to it because you lost a row of function keys with tactile feedback (ie physical key). Some really objected to the loss of a physical Escape button. Probably vim users.

I agree with you that Touch ID is great. I sure wish the latest iPhones had it (you could put a sensor on the back if you didn't want to lose the screen real estate). Face ID is absolutely atrocious.

Anyway, the problem here is that basically Johnny Ive went insane, chasing thinness to the extreme. Design is the art of compromise (as they say) and no compromising on thinness led to shitty products (eg the 12" Macbook).

There are many people here (myself included) that for years simply wanted a 13" Macbook Air with an upgraded screen (as close to edgeless as possible and higher res) and more memory. That's it. We waited for years. We got the shitty 12" Macbook instead.

It's incredibly frustrating to be so close to perfection but to take a giant step backwards instead.

Well put. I tried the new 16" keyboard, and while its way better than my 2018 MBP, its still not good enough. Chasing thinness really just seems to be something a select few wanted. As the name implies, I wanted a "Pro" laptop that had high spec processing, ram and storage. What I got is a laptop that doubles as a lap warmer, white noise generator, and user hostile to OS environments other than MacOS. So now I have a mid spec Surface Pro for development, and use the macbook for more creative type endeavors. I wish I could find a way to extract the keyboard from this surface and put it in my macbook. That would make me less annoyed by the heat and fan while running windows.

I disagree with everything stated here and, maybe I'm just lucky, but I haven't had any issues at all with the keyboard on any of my Macbook Pros (work, personal, or my SO's) and I can't go back to not having a Touch Bar.

I'm really curious about the numbers surrounding this. Especially with the latest sales figures, I'm curious if this is just a vocal minority or if most users agree with you that this is a step backward.

I guess a large part is that you can't use it without looking at it. If you're a touch typist you want to be able to do everything on the computer without thinking or moving your hands from the home row.

The Touchbar is terrible for Visual Studio Debugging. I have to take my eyes off the screen and cant rest my finger on F10 to step through code. That is ANTI productive. One of the reasons I spring for a macbook is so I can run MacOS, Windows or Linux on solid hardware. The touchbar is fine for things like Logic ProX or some other non development tool, but I need permanent function keys to work in Windows/Visual Studio. Thats a large part of what I do. IMO the touch bar is a GREAT idea if you also have physical function keys on the keyboard.

I don't hate it as much as I hate that it isn't an option. If it were a $500 add on I would never ever choose it as an option for my laptop, and now it's kind of mandatory if you want a fast macOS laptop. I will accept a laptop from my company with the touchbar, but I don't know that I would be willing to buy one myself. It's been a while since I used windows or linux as my dev OS, but might be willing to give it a shot with a good thinkpad. I hope apple makes it an option for the bigger faster MBP

I can't stand the Macbook Pro keyboard and touchpad. I accidentally input the touchpad on the regular basis because it's enormous, and the keyboard slows down my typing speed substantially. My "o" repeats somewhat often as well, as other people have suggested.

My best quality of life improvement with this machine was to connect an external windows keyboard and mouse. Swap the windows key with the alt key, and you have a beautiful macos keyboard.