If anything, mentioning that these decisions were probably made by an upper management/investor system of sorts keeps people's expectations grounded when it comes to possibly reverting the site. People keep asking for it and while it would be a nice pipe dream, it's like 99% certain it's not gonna happen because it's just not realistic. Time and paid labor was put into it, which means a lot of money was put into it. And considering Michael actually has avoided the question then it's obvious we're not going to see an answer in the form of a rollback, possibly not even as gracious as an actual response to the question, "Why was this necessary in the first place?"
I'm definitely not saying we need to be wearing tinfoil hats here lmao I'm saying we as creators have the right to recognize Tapas' pattern of behavior these last few years and how it factors into their current decisions - and how it will undoubtedly shape their future ones, as well as our own as creators. We can turn this into just a bug-reporting thread, sure - but just reporting the bugs is sort of missing the bigger problem that's let it get this far in the first place. You can't put a band-aid on a bullethole, you need to remove the bullet. The redesign, the bugs, the current lack of features that were simple and doable that are now gone for some reason, such as banners - it's all a symptom of a much bigger problem, which boils down to Tapas' lack of transparency about what sort of platform they're trying to be, and for who. If they're trying to go through a complete rebrand (again, technically, because they went through their first big one when they changed to Tapas and released the app) then that's fine, but they need to communicate that. They can't expect to just make changes willy nilly without some amount of community backlash and speculation - especially when they've been largely silent on the issues in return. Yes, the circumstances are plenty different at a time like this, but all the while plenty of us are using this time to decide if it's worth waiting around for them to fix these issues if the reason why they're issues in the first place are never being addressed.
Also - and this is me being crass, I'll probably get the paddle for it - the Tapas staff may not operate on weekends, but the mods are free reign. And I haven't seen any topic redirection from them yet. After all, it's called "Website updates and collecting feedback", isn't it? And the thread itself was created to compile everyone's complaints and feedback into one thread because before it was made, there were like 6 different loose threads on the topic. The only other one that exists now is the user-run poll thread. So part of me would like to believe that even the mods know that Tapas' behavior surrounding the update is still relevant even if it's not standard bug-reporting. But maybe that's just my own pipe dream lmao I'm almost definitely going to get an ass whooping after this, aren't I?
Now I know their situation is different, but here's some funny food for thought - over on GlobalComix, the community asked for banners, and they had it done within the hour. Tapas obviously has its differences in that it's an actual office with a chain of command and need approval on what they can work on at any given time, vs. GC which is run by a very small staff without investor support (afaik). But GC also has a really small staff and it seemed to be zero issue for them to do. Would it really be that hard for Tapas to add something that we had already programmed into the website prior to the update? IDK how much their backend has changed from a designer/programmer perspective, but it can't have been that severe that they can say they "don't know how to do it". The longer time goes on, especially considering the banners were some of the first things people asked to have back basically as soon as this thread was up, before all the COVID-19 shutdowns, tells me that their answer wouldn't be "we couldn't figure it out", but rather "It's not in our game plan even though there's community demand for it" or even more tongue-in-cheek, "Webtoons doesn't do it, so we're not doing it."
So yes, I do think people need to manage their expectations. Right now my expectations - as well as those of many others - have been brought down to the lowest bar possible for Tapas. Because they've proved we can't expect much better of them through their actions alone. It's gonna take a lot of bug fixes to put a dent in that iceberg.
In the meantime, yes, we have to be patient, I'm not denying that. We have to wait for Tapas to achieve some semblance of normalcy in these rough times. But we can also be there for each other as creators while we decide if sticking it out further is worth it considering Tapas' circumstances of making a lot of the same mistakes over and over again while ignoring the bigger issue causing said mistakes.