I mean, this is fair feedback. We can work to improve our process in this area for sure.
We have to remember though that a single person disliking something isn’t (usually) a strong enough signal for change. That’s not a stab at the one person, and I’m not saying we don’t take individuals seriously, but if we’re building a feature for thousands or even millions of people, and one person alone took to disliking it, by extension there may be a couple tens or hundreds of people that agree, but that’s not a large amount by any means in the grand scheme of things. You’re right to flag that we should make this more explicit, but that doesn’t change it.
Had the opportunity and the proposed solution received the overwhelming negative feedback as we’ve had in the release thread, then yeah, we’d have weighed it entirely differently, of course!
One quick sidenote about the beta that you keep bringing up: it’s not for testing whether users “like” a change, it’s for stability testing. So while we do monitor for feedback there, we don’t usually roll something back (entity ID naming was a recent exception).
Anyway, I walk away from all this having learned more about our user base (the part we interact with, mind you, we shouldn’t ever forget that!), fully owning up to the fact that we’ve made a bit of a mistake. We overcorrected the old trigger ID feature to the point where the balance between ease of use and choice/configurability shifted the wrong way, specifically for existing users, and now we’re correcting course.
I do want to bring up though that, unlike many other products you might be using on a daily basis, we do NOT have mountains of analytics data to go off of. We don’t have session recordings looking at how people use the products, we don’t have any data on how specific features are being used, etc. The analytics that we do have are very rudimentary and honestly not that useful when shaping features like this.
This means that we have to make assumptions and will, inevitably, make mistakes. I’m not being defensive or making excuses here, I’m just saying it how it is. I love the HA community for being vocal and telling us exactly where we’ve taken a wrong turn. As long as we keep listening and keep the discussions civil, I think we’re in a good place. Hopefully you agree.