I’m a big fan of keeping all the information close at hand, whereas much of the useful features (page order etc.) are contained below the fold, down where the custom fields etc. are in the current version. But I imagine that many typical blog owners would prefer the new route hence they’ve gone in that direction. Modifying the admin panel is quite easy anyway though and I’m sure there will be some good admin theme plugins released shortly, in fact (I think) I am the first person to release one into the WordPress plugins repository … although mine is not actually useful for blogging purposes.

I hadn’t noticed the RSS feed feature of the dashboard, I’ll have to go check that out. It sounds like it could be a good alternative to Google Reader.