Question to the Thunderbird devs (no rant)

[Meem55]

First, to all who might react to this topic: this is no rant, so please do not use this topic to rant.
Also, I don't have any intentions to be sarcastic or being rude or whatever. English is not my native tongue, so if it looks like that, please try to read over that 😊

(I know this might not get an answer here, or even get removed because it doesn't meet the community guidelines. But if anything else, please acknowledge the very big group of loyal, long time users who are having (a lot of) problems with Supernova and speak out. There is no reaction whatsoever and that stings a lot of us)

To the Thunderbird devs
It is known that you all worked very hard and long on Thunderbird Supernova. There is no question about that and personally I applaude you all for that.
But there is a fast growing amount of messages from people who can't work with 115 Supernova in comparison with 102. It shows here in the forum but also on sites like Reddit and others.
I'm aware that those are most likely in the minority when you look at the amount of Thunderbird users.
But is still a very big part of the Thunderbird users.

And I don't mean the "getting used to a new version" here. That fact is logical and is something that you as a team were very aware of when I read the blogs you released.
I mean the ease of use of 102 and earlier. That was the main reason for a lot of people in the past (including me) to change their e-mail program to Thunderbird.
There was no hassle what so ever: I myself installed it and could use it right away. It was very intuitive in use, it was logical. No need to dive deep into settings, no need to tweak CSS, and so on.
I was SO happy when I discovered Thunderbird.

My question to the devs is: why is that abandoned?
I know you tried to keep that concept but that isn't translating in Supernova. I upgraded from 102 to 115 and was lost right away. Like many, I got lost in the settings (also because of the new features I don't need/use).
It really exceeded the whole "getting used to a new version". It's like a new e-mail program which was not my intention to use.
As an example I use the unified approach that has been chosen to use in Supernova. It might be a trend to use that? Maybe other programs are using it too? Whatever, I don't know. But this is typically something that a lot of us were fleeing from and found Thunderbird which was just normal.

Final thought/tip: I'm fully aware that with a change like this, there will always be users who don't like it. Something you also said to be aware of in your blogs: there is no way for the devs to make everybody happy.
But for the future: please at least give a warning? Now we all were completely surprised when the update came from 102 to 115. No warning, no remarks, no way to revert back to 102, it was just there.
Because this also is a cause of all the negative comments: it felt like "Here is Supernova and good luck!".
If there was a warning, a choise, it all would be a lot less negative.

[keithunder]

I used to absolutely love Thunderbird

The best bit was the alert add on .. Important emails made a noise for my attention and unimportant ones like newsletters glide in silently for me to look at later.

Now I get an alert for EVERY SINGLE  email whether I need to know about it urgently or not

Plus why does the cursor randomly appear when I look at a folder it used to stay on the last read email?

Please fix these bugs I really don't want to go through the pain of finding another client which works