I can understand part of why this was changed, because even before the patch I found that I often would get "lost" looking for the correct button because the icons/menus with fairly similar functions (like inventory and armory chest) were fairly easy to get mixed up visually and I'd end up clicking the wrong button.

Does this mean I like the new menu? Nope. Turns out I'm now trying to figure out how certain old menus relate to the icon they've been grouped under because, frankly, it's so compressed it doesn't make sense anymore. I'd vote for having the old menu back purely on the account it takes 2 clicks less to open menus assuming I got the right button the first time (and I was improving).

What would probably solve it for just about everyone is if it worked like a micro hotbar, but mostly allowed only commands that open up windows and such. Then you could chose how many buttons there were, which were grouped under menus and maybe even what icons were used. Of course, that'd require a bit of development time on SE's part and add another layer of complexity to the UI which could cause issues for some player (the kind that probably lead to support calls to figure out how to do things).

Overall, for me this is just kind of an annoyance issue. I like the 2.1 patch in general, but there are a couple things that really do bug me (which I won't discuss on this thread).