Lack of Usability and Ergonomy

Question

We are a small research unit at the University of Oxford, and we normally keep all our various machines up-to-date. So we  tried to move our Macs to Lion as it became available. After an unprecedented number of complaints and a massive loss of data due to a new feature, we are for the first time reverting back to an older operating system and also make every attempt possible to downgrade the new machines that we recently purchased. As these drastic counter-measures imply a massive loss of time and money, we did not do so light-heartedly. Hence prior to switching to 10.7 inadvertedly, anybody working in a productive environment relying on a usable and suffently ergonomic IT infrastructure should therefore consider the below list of the manifold reasons that triggered our decision:
It became nearly impossible to work with large documents (text, tables, figures, illustrations, large plans etc ...): Many applications require a fine-pitch control in the horizontal and vertical position of the documents displayed. This is normally done by means of the scroll arrows in a unified and ergonomic way. This is no more possible! Using the arrow keys, trackpads or other methods (which differ from one application to the other) is no viable alternative, as this is often very inergonomic (requiring two hands, taking the hand off the mouse, doing  acrobatic finger exercises or jumping by whole pages). Even reading a long text document by simply placing the mouse on the "down arrow" and then clicking down line by line is no more possible.  
The automatic document handling might lead to data loss and/or poor performance: We require full control of what documents are being saved, the locations of where they go to, when this happens and also what names the documents have. For instance, when making changes to a document, an essential requirement is that the machine must be able of saving it under a different name at the request of the user. This has been eliminated (no more choice to  "save as" a different file). Moreover, the new autosave feature might overwrite the old version of a document albeit this is not desired, and also slow down the machine when sweeping in at the wrong moment. In connection with the new autosave feature, our usual practice of editing and re-arranging documents to then store them as new files has already caused various unwanted data losses.  
Presentations cannot be shown as they play on the wrong screen: The full screen mode now switches automatically to the internal screen, and also seems to render secondary screens unusable. So while keynote still seems ok for presentations on external screens, this has become tricky with most other applications. For instance, any pre-recorded material from DVD's now plays internally.
Working with many documents and applications became very complicated: The way Expose and Spaces worked prior to Lion allowed one to move the mouse in a corner to see miniatures of *all* open Windows, and to immediately click the desired one to come upfront. Now windows belonging to the same application appear stacked, and finding the right window is sometimes very painful (in particular if one does not know which application deals with the desired document).
The lack of an install DVD is too risky: We have to replace 2-3 harddisks per year, and often enough these are total failures. In such a case, having no way of restoring the system other than via the (unreliable) internet is not acceptable. For security reasons, some of your machines are not even connected to the web, and we need a way of restoring them without any connection to the outside world.
The servicability has suffered: Having different versions of operating systems is always a pain when one has to keep a large number of machines up-to-date. We have a large number of first-generation Intel machines that are still perfect for office use, and we'll keep them for some more years. Those machines cannot be upgraded to Lion - i.e. we would have to deal with two different system installations.
In view of the above, we are back to 10.6.8.  We hope that Apple is going to revise some of the decisions and give us back the functionallity and ease-of-use that we had in the past.

Answer 1

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html