So the weird, incoherent mess of options on each screen, sized and placed seemingly at random, with ads often far more prominent than any of the stuff you might actually want to do on that screen, is actually an XBone-ism? Boo, I hoped that if I ever got around to having one of those it'd be nicer :-(
I do remember it updating & changing at some point, and that it still sucked before that. I got it after the blade menu, though. I think it had that at first, but lost it as soon as it updated after plugging it in, so I never really used it. NXE's what I probably used the first times I actually played anything on it.
Googles
Oh my god, yes, I do remember NXE. Hahahaha, wow, I'd forgotten that. How awful. I partially retract my complaints about the current menus.
For reference:
- Blades dash has four or five "blades" that you can flip between. Each blade has it's own UI and can open up into submenus.
- NXE dash has a vertical list of horizontal menus, sort of like XMB flipped on its side. Or the Blades dash flipped on its side and with everything on one row each. This design was tweaked several times, most notably when the Kinect launched.
- Grid dash has a grid of icons, vaguely like the Wii Menu, except you can't reorganize anything on it and everything is ads.
I got my 360 the day before the NXE launched, so I didn't notice a performance regression with NXE. But using the grid dash today makes the console feel incredibly sluggish.