At the risk of being the noob with a chip on their shoulder, I have to say that I think the current release is actually a step back from Tahr and Xenial pups in overall usability.
I had a long rant, but I think I can condense it to a few points which are slightly less rambling:
1) There's a lot of unlabelled buttons and icons in the interface, which is bad for discoverability. Some things (like the new-default, non-traditional Puppy desktop, with its unlabelled dock) can be changed (although they shouldn't have to be). Others (like the buttons in the fringes of PupControl) can't be.
2) When it comes to the interface, theming, etc., there's a lot of buttons that send you to the same places as are linked to in another (apparently unrelated) configuration panel, without it being clear that that's where you're going. What's worse, it's possible and very common to then have buttons that go right back to where you came from, so you can very well end up with the same tool in multiple windows. Anything involving pTheme, as well as the Theme Switcher, are good examples of this.
3) Along the same line, there seem to be a lot of configuration tools, options and buttons in various parts of the interface that do or control the same things when just one tool would suffice (or maybe two -- provided that there's one clearly labelled "Quick" setup that actually is easier to use, and then the real, full config tool, with advanced options that aren't available in the other).
4) Desktop Icons arrangement names need some work. For example, it isn't clear exactly what "Minimal" and "Bin" are. What's worse, continuing in the same theme as the last two points, I think there is actually a control panel somewhere else that controls the same thing, offers more options, and has full text descriptions, but it's buried in something like the Event Manager that isn't obviously related to the desktop, and is hard to find if you don't know right where it is.
5) No Quickpet is not good for quick setup.
6) SFS tools seem a bit hit and miss. The package manager and universal installer in the dock's second menu option for the SFS manager didn't do anything when I tried it (admittedly, in VirtualBox). Based on the package manager, though, and the fact that I installed a SFS manager from a Pup repo, I'm not sure it's even built in. If that's so, having a menu option for something that's not included in the base system seems kind of misleading.
7) Not sure if this is a problem with the SFS manager or UPupBB, but I might as well hit on it while I'm here. The SFS manager wants "Puppy to be installed" before it runs. That's a weak error message. Installed to
what? If they mean that they need a save file, that's one thing. That said, though, I'm not sure why it should simply refuse to run. If nothing it does gets saved, that's my problem.
I guess this is probably Joe's 'fault', not yours, but I do miss the Motif option and non-gradient window themes. Figured I'd throw that in somewhere.
If you would like more detail or explanation of these complaints, I'd be happy to provide them. Puppy is in my opinion the greatest distro for flash drives. In fact, if Puppy doesn't work out over the long haul, I'm not sure there's anywhere else to go. And I'm not keen on staying with Xenial Ubuntu as a base forever and running increasingly old software just because I don't like new themes/the interface/whatever.