Well, any change invites considerable resistance. So I'd even say they have to ignore more than 1%.
Most of us tech savvy people don't realize this, but a lot of people (if not most) use software through memorization. They memorize their path to the most common tasks that they use it for, and stick to those. Call it the 80-20 of use cases. A really good UI allows people to learn these new tasks relatively easily, but that is not to say this is not cumbersome for most people regardless. Any change requires users to pause and invest time in discovery before they can actually do what they want to do.
So, any change is annoying in itself for these users; and that is completely regardless of the merits of the change. User adoption after users are (not to sound too fascist) forced to accept changes is the real measure of the legitimacy of these changes, not the initial reaction.
As software engineers and designers we have to have a much longer term understanding of feature growth and functionality, if it was up to users it would always be more of the same which gets too complicated way too quickly. You add one more button of that much desired functionality and pretty soon you're left with remote controllers with a hundred buttons.
Totally agree with your point. The new design is actually a lot better. In the older design, I had to wade thru a lot of visual crap before I got to stuff like news feed or my own wall. but the new design has made it easier.
Are you really comparing the new design with what was the case a month ago? You sound like you're comparing the previous design with the older 2006-2008 design.
