Why would I want my dev tools, audio apps, 3-D-modeling apps, and office apps all jumbled together?

It's as if Apple is trying to catch up to Microsoft in the race to regress.

No. Launchpad is just the iOS springboard brought to Mac, with big icons and folders and pages. When it was added people complained of "iOS-ification".

This time they made a proper, unique Mac equivalent, integrated in Spotlight and built around the keyboard. It's not as good, the window was too small in 26.0, doesn't support uninstallation like Launchpad, but it's definitely less iOS-like.

I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.

Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.

I much prefer the new app launcher in Tahoe, but it was created at the expense of Launchpad, which some people actually relied on. I don't know why they couldn't have kept both options.

You get worse icon pop-in if you add your app folder with grid view to the dock. These aren't stored on the network, so it's baffling they take so long to load the icons.