Technical limitations aside, when you intend to make UI changes like this, you don't just spring it on the community, especially not with a "Sorry, we can't go back" type of excuse. I'm a software engineer and with any UI changes, we have to consider the effect on our users and WARN THEM that changes are coming. We have small numbers of users who test the change so we can get feedback on it, before we implement into the full production system. My company unfortunately did have to learn the hard way in the past, as they used to do exactly what SE did, and it lost them customers because they were so furious about the unasked for and unannounced UI changes as they had incorporated the previous versions into the way their business worked.