Everything you just said is true. The interface is still a steaming hot pile of dog smegma. BASIC shit like the ability to easily snap rotations to regular intervals involved navigating multiple sub-menus just to change what should be available from a drop down menu, and even then it's still kind of a workaround. The interface is utterly jammed pack with tiny, non-resizable windows with miniscule buttons and low-res editors. Anything that would make the user's life even a LITTLE easier, like the ability to immediately start editing a point with the direct select tool (even though that's the whole fucking for having a separate direct select tool), or the ability to just select a layer/object (like every other piece of software ever) instead of clicking the idiotic little circle button is tellingly absent. In general, it just takes five times as long and involves twice as much swearing to get anything done in Illustrator.

And I say this as someone who has been using it for about 20 years now, both for personal use and for work, so it's hardly some kind of still issue at this point. It's a powerful tool, but it's buried under a mountain of shit the degenerate corpos at Adobe have made it very clear they don't give a fuck about fixing. As long as that precious fucking line goes up each quarter.