Yep. Bertrand Serlet's comments on stage pretty much summed up Apple's attitude: they love the Finder in Leopard. They either don't know or don't care about just how much the Finder has really lost, nor do they focus on major UI issues in the Mac OS X Finder (that have been documented extensively in many blogs and articles), issues that create daily frustration or confusion for many users.

I'd bet that even this Put Back feature will be a poor imitation of the old one, just like everything else. Scrollable stacks that can dive into folders? Please, Mac OS 8.5's pop-up windows were brilliant, scrollable windows that could do everything else that Finder windows could do, and it doesn't even look like Stack pop-ups can be resized.

It's a pretty big job, trying to reimplement every last little one of Mac OS 9's features on top of Nextstep.

It turns out that elegance of design and general usability concerns, combined with the need for new features, were more important than replicating every last feature of Mac OS 9 over the past decade.

If "Put Back" works on the desktop like "Put Away" used to, then, yes, finally a return to the good ol' days! I used Command-Y a lot back then...