So it appears with 2018.42.2 the camera can be put up top, but music HAS to be in full mode or the camera is half way up the screen. At least I can use the camera again.
The cheaper Model 3 restriction protocol still applies: you shall not mix and match any way you like as if you had Model S / X (such as the pre-V9 camera on top, map on bottom...) I hope Tesla will continue to fix it so S/X can have the freedom to place an app anywhere we want again.
The extra inch of unusable map they left on top and the permanent media below seem like malicious compliance. The let you put an app sort of on top, but you didn't phrase your wish correctly so the genie had some wiggle room to amuse himself with your frustrations.
Updated yesterday and back to camera on top! One positive step! The rest - the muddled gray on gray color scheme, tiny buttons, high-school-intern-design-choices remain...
I've gotta ask... what's the average age of folks railing against the new UI? I just... having come to model S late in the game (1 month before v9) I never had time to get attached to the old look/feel. The only time I've generally seen people get that attached to poor UX is 50+ folks with their favorite websites. I write software for a living, lots of it GUI stuff. I'm no designer, but I spend a lot of time perfecting little bits of UX to make things "feel" good, so I'm not a novice either. To me, v9 is objectively better in almost every way. Those god awful early-2000s app icons are gone, as is the "touch a nebulously defined top portion of the screen to see the apps" UX paradigm that was honestly terrible. Everything is cleaner looking, and the controls vs. settings confusion is replaced with a much nicer looking unified interface. And as to the split screen... to me it always felt like exactly what it was: someone using the most simple X window manager they could find to "split" the screen into 2 active windows with a kinda-janky qt animation for flipping them. It was literally the easiest, laziest way to "fill" a 17" vertical display with more than one active item. The kind of active window/display management they're doing now isn't trivial, and it allows them *much* greater flexibility in terms of future UI/UX changes. I'm sure it will evolve to allow more customization as time goes on, but ranting about how "good" the old UI was isn't productive because it's A) never coming back and B) wasn't that good to begin with
You start off by asking the wrong question. It isn't the look and feel of the UI that anyone is complaining about - it is the functionality. In V8, Tesla said here, have Navigation, A Web Browser (well, this one absolutely sucks, but it is a choice), Media/Music, Rear Camera, Energy graphing, Phone link. Pick one or two and you can place them however you want. In V9 they said: "Here, have maps as they are the single most important thing in the world. I know we are working to having FSD which requires absolutely no map display, but 1) you either need to know where all of the god awful traffic around you is 2) You are on a trip where you need to use navigation or 3) you are a complete and total moron that can't figure out how to get to and from work every day. Oh, and you can put something else on the bottom if you want, but dammit, you still need the maps."