I agree with OP I'm not a fan of the new wallet design.
Being able to supposedly export private keys does not guarantee that you actually have them. For all you know, Bitcoin Core could be outputting gibberish when you use dumpprivkey. If all you want is to see private keys, then listdescriptors will do that.
What do you mean? Any WIF key can easily be converted to an address by many different libraries in many languages that could easily confirm Bitcoin Core is not "outputting gibberish".
No, it actually makes things easier.
No, a
real user is telling you it's actually more difficult. You'd likely benefit by taking their input into consideration. A bunch of core devs probably isn't the best test group for usability. Just because someone knows more about something than someone else, doesn't mean they know best.
It's sad that Core continues to miss on UX year after year...