Oh that particular change drives me crazy. It's not the switch per se, it's the lecture I receive when I slip up and use the muscle-memory procedure of File->Save As with a .tif extension, like I did for the first decade of using GIMP. The software has quite clearly identified what I'm trying to do, so refusing to comply and forcing me to jump through an arbitrary hoop is akin to jeering the words "You didn't say 'Simon Says'"!

The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original.

It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.)

[For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]