I am by no means a mixing dude or anywhere near being a recording engineer, so these lines are simply an observation.
So it seems a few of things irritate many with the new mixer, two of them are darkness and disorientation. I’ve seen this discussed in several places now. So I went and searched for pictures real life mixers, and strangely enough there are a large number of dark faced mixers, and not at all bad to look at, I included a few in this post. I also saw many that “pleased” me more than others and some that directly displeased me. I think what pleasing translates to is an immediate understanding of what I saw. What JMCecil talked about above.
So in looking at them all, a few light ones too, but I concentrated on dark ones (for obvious reasons) and it appears to me that one thing is strikingly missing or rather I think it was supposed to be there by clever illusion (more in the bottom part of the mixer, with the sliders). I am talking about a very distinct separation of channels. The ones of most disinterest to me had very weak “lines” of separation between channels, where they were sort of disorienting, and the ones with lines (and I like many dislike a lot of lines in a UI, but) they immediately “registered”.
Instinctively I also went over to PT11 to take a look at its mixer (click on “Images”) and I have to say it is by no means any better, at least not to my eyes. Way too busy. However, again, I am not mixing a whole lot, so these are just my personal opinions.