You can customise it to a larger degree than you realise, with tools such as BetterTouchTool. You can script it. It takes some work to setup but it allows for extremely cool things to happen. This should be right up every hacker's alley!
Regarding discoverability - it's a touchscreen, why wouldn't you swipe it? No one complains about two-pinch zoom not being discoverable. It requires a single a-ha moment which you could've had from taking a cursory look at the Touchbar documentation.
As a hacker news reader, it's on you for not checking out the powerful possibilities before categorising it as bad.
Edit: I'm finding articles explaining the swipe-to-change from 2017, so it should be on that model (I believe it's on every model since the beginning).
Turns out it's a separate control, not enabled by default. Only took me three web searches to find that out, and find out how to find the configuration UI for the control strip so I could replace the default controls with the swipeable ones.
I don't know. Maybe you're right. Maybe I was wrong to assume that Apple knows how to build discoverable user interfaces. I guess I should've spent a lot more time reading manuals and dinking around with the keyboard on this machine, instead of letting myself be distracted with trivialities like building software, solving problems, and getting work done.
Regarding discoverability - it's a touchscreen, why wouldn't you swipe it? No one complains about two-pinch zoom not being discoverable. It requires a single a-ha moment which you could've had from taking a cursory look at the Touchbar documentation.
As a hacker news reader, it's on you for not checking out the powerful possibilities before categorising it as bad.
Edit: I'm finding articles explaining the swipe-to-change from 2017, so it should be on that model (I believe it's on every model since the beginning).