And I still have the opinion that people dislike SL 2.0 because they fundamentally dislike change, which is a core feeling of every single human being on this planet. We abhor change and love stability and "eternally unchanging" things. The rest are just concepts of our mind to justify why change is bad.

To settle this discussion, we would have to use a double-blind testing procedure: get a group of, say, a thousand people, whi have never seen SL before, to download and use SL 2.0 for 6 months, and strictly forbid them to download any other version (not even read about it!). Then let them install 1.X. I'm quite sure that a majority will hate the change and invent all sorts of arguments why it is "worse" than 2.0…

Of course, this test is impossible to perform, and it would be too easily biased. For instance, those testers would see something named 1.X as being "inferior" as 2.X, so they would naturally reject it. And it would be impossible to put those thousand people inside a lab, close the doors, and monitor their Internet usage to make sure that each of them never gets in touch with a different opinion than their own. Only then would we see the reaction against change emerging naturally, and the rejection of 1.X as being "different" and thus "worse"… in reality, obviously, we cannot do that, and people's opinions will mingle with other people's opinions all the time, strongly reinforced by a feeling to reject change.

LL, when beta-testing 2.0, just picked some hundred or so testers, among a typically abnormal group of "early adopters". Early adopters are quite less prone to resist change or using different things than the ones they're familiar with. Nevertheless, almost everybody in that group found 2.0 "awkward" during the first week, as shown by the many conversations during that period. In fact, the more they relied upon certain "quirks" of the 1.X UI to get their work done quickly (e.g. builders), the more they rejected 2.0.

But after a week or so, all in that group got used to 2.0 quickly enough, and just focused on specific instances where LL did, indeed, do a bad implementation job. Typical examples are the way inventory (and inventory transfers) are done. The way the inventory refreshes so oddly. How it's near to impossible to locate an item and drag it to someone else, or how it's impossible to drag items across tabs (unless you open a new Inventory window). There is also some unnecessary clutter when incoming messages appear. And there is a lot of functionality that should be optional or available, like the ability to create buttons on a toolbar (on top or on the bottom, like Kirstens' Viewer allows) instead of navigating through several layers of right-clicking on things. So in terms of usability testing, SL 2.0 could have had far more polishing — but that's just because we're comparing the level of "polish" in 2.0, something which has merely 18 months of development, to 1.X, which has 8 years of development (and has even more quirks — we are just used to them).

No matter how much work and effort LL might have put on SL 2.0, however, it would always fail the ultimate barrier of dealing with people's perception about changing to a different interface. The more different it is, the strongest the resistance would always have been. Make it more like a Mac, and all Windows users would hate it. Make it more like Facebook, and Facebook-haters will detest it. And the irony is that if they didn't make enough change, people would complain that "2.0" would be too strong a label, if things worked pretty much the same way…

Where to start with this one? Well VAT is as good a place as any.

This is serious "Be careful what you wish for" territory, once L$ is deemed a real currency we're slap bang in the middle of red tape city, distance selling regulations would surely apply.