The very first of the five major requirements they listed:

"Legible. Application icons should be distinguishable from one another at small icon sizes, on file icons, and in the OS. Icons must be differentiable beyond color and should be legible for color blind persons via shape, letter-forms, tone, or other method."

They sure didn't meet that stated goal. I guess I'll be copying over the icon from Illustrator 10 yet again...

Who is the target audience who would have enough of these applications installed that they would "own the dock"? At most I only ever used maybe 5 programs out of the whole Creative Suite enough to maintain shortcuts for them. Even the people I know who are professional animators or whatever and live in the Adobe world don't typically use much more than that number.

I do like the new look (especially the splash screens), although I rarely use any of the programs anymore. But if I were responsible for the branding, I would have looked at the most common combinations of programs as distinct sets and picked colors that way. The entirety of the suite package only makes sense to look at as a single entity to Adobe... a user who has Dreamweaver installed is unlikely to also have AfterEffects, and so on.

I don't see the dock much because I just quickly command+tab my way to the windows as it's more efficient.

But I think the departure from the solid colored blocks towards the colored strokes and text is the wrong way to go because of how much more subtle it is.