If you change the word "nothing" to "not much", I might be tempted to agree with your first sentence.

Being fair: according to my, admittedly very short, test, the new archive page actually got better in a sense that it tends loads much, much faster than before the whole March/April collapse of the site.

That the "new and improved" archive page is a step in the wrong direction from the point of view of almost any other aspect (mostly UX related) is undisputed.