No program feature should ever be designed to be "friendly to newbies".
Easy to use (in general) - yes; easy to learn - yes; hard to do accidentally - yes; low friction - yes; discoverable - yes. However, designing for the person who has never learned to use the feature inevitably leads to your program having a very low skill ceiling and being a disservice to power users.
Also, how do you know the new design is "friendly to newbies"? You're not a newbie and neither are any of the other Emacs developers. Without lots of user studies, you have no idea what is "friendly to newbies".
A more proper way to do this change would be to go "Hey, I've been running into an issue with using registers for a while and solved it for myself with this change. Let's add it as an option and vote on what the default should be." This is a much better approach, because
1. It is designed based on real user feedback. Even if it's just one user, people aren't unique, so there must be many like that person. "I like it this way" is a much stronger argument than "my imaginary newbie likes it this way".
2. It invites the rest of the community to decide on the default program behaviour. Software must serve its current users first and foremost. Thus, what the majority says should be the default is what the default should be.
This is where Volpiatto and Zaretskii went wrong. A change was made and pushed to solve an imaginary problem for imaginary users without involving the people actually affected. They broke their users' trust.
Easy to use (in general) - yes; easy to learn - yes; hard to do accidentally - yes; low friction - yes; discoverable - yes. However, designing for the person who has never learned to use the feature inevitably leads to your program having a very low skill ceiling and being a disservice to power users.
Also, how do you know the new design is "friendly to newbies"? You're not a newbie and neither are any of the other Emacs developers. Without lots of user studies, you have no idea what is "friendly to newbies".
A more proper way to do this change would be to go "Hey, I've been running into an issue with using registers for a while and solved it for myself with this change. Let's add it as an option and vote on what the default should be." This is a much better approach, because
1. It is designed based on real user feedback. Even if it's just one user, people aren't unique, so there must be many like that person. "I like it this way" is a much stronger argument than "my imaginary newbie likes it this way".
2. It invites the rest of the community to decide on the default program behaviour. Software must serve its current users first and foremost. Thus, what the majority says should be the default is what the default should be.
This is where Volpiatto and Zaretskii went wrong. A change was made and pushed to solve an imaginary problem for imaginary users without involving the people actually affected. They broke their users' trust.