Outlook's UI design by itself really is terrible. I don't know how so many people accept using it. I have a single business account I used Outlook for, switched to Thunderbird, and it is vastly less painful to use. I can find, read, and sort emails at least 3x quicker than with Outlook.
Modern commercial UI/UX design really has drifted far away from "good." Photoshop suffers the same problem - 10 years ago the UI was quick, responsive, and efficient. Now it feels like wading through mud.
I've been using Outlook for .. wow over 25 years now.
Early on it was an unstable crashy mess, but in the past 15 years it has been rock solid, reliable, and more than fast enough for anything I've ever done with it.
I am ... not happy that the full client is slated to go away at some point in the future. I know Outlook well; I know how to wield it effectively and to make it behave in the way I want it to.
I have a Macbook and a Windows desktop PC at work. Outlook on the Mac is a tire fire, and it is the new WebView2 version. Horrendous. For the moment, I can get something like the full Windows Outlook application via Outlook for the Web, which is saying a lot, because it itself is an extremely watered-down version of the full Outlook email client on Windows.
Microsoft has been doing this a lot lately, and it's starting to make me a bit angry. They replace good stuff that they don't want to work on anymore with some web-enabled version or a version built on web technologies, which itself is a bad idea, even if the replacements were feature-complete compared to what they're replacing, but they're not. They're partial skeletons in comparison to what they're replacing. Toys. ALL of the advanced features that I have come to rely on in Outlook in the past 25 years are simply not present in Outlook for Mac.
It's a bad trend and I don't see it stopping. In another decade, the apps we have now will be replaced with something else once someone at Microsoft once again gets it inside their head that it'll be better to rewrite rather than to adopt the existing code, and that version will be even slimmer and more useless than what's coming out today.
We are choosing to make things worse every day and I do not understand it. I'm not saying that Outlook is a shining example of a good application, or that it is even in the top 10 email clients, I'm saying that I'm used to it and that I like it. It has continuously improved for 25 years and now it's slated to be replaced with a fucking webapp that's running locally.
What in the world are people smoking thinking that ease of development is paramount to performance for applications which are very interaction-heavy? Typing text into Outlook for Mac on an M1 with 32GB of RAM is not instantaneous. FOR AN EMAIL APPLICATION. Unacceptable, but this is the route they're choosing because development is easier...
I will never understand how web tech got so bad, and even if I do wind up understanding that, I will definitely not ever understand why people choose to use web technologies over things which have worked and have continually improved for decades.
> in the past 15 years it has been rock solid, reliable, and more than fast enough for anything I've ever done with it.
I've been using it for as long as you, and I agree with these assessments. But those aren't the reasons why nobody I know uses it voluntarily, and everyone I personally know who uses it dislikes it.
Modern commercial UI/UX design really has drifted far away from "good." Photoshop suffers the same problem - 10 years ago the UI was quick, responsive, and efficient. Now it feels like wading through mud.