Recent Changes to KMail

Why do people insist on "fixing" things that aren't broken and obscuring how 
to change things back the way they were before?

I have been fighting with KMail for the past few days to change the message 
list display to the way it has always looked since I started using linux 
back before there was such a thing as Fedora Core (I think it was RedHat 
5.) Suddenly last week, KMail crashed on me and when it came back, it 
looked nothing like it used to. 

I tried just about every setting I could think of to get a threaded display 
back, and the closest I could come was "Current Activity by Date, 
threaded." Finally, out of desperation today, I tried "Standard Mailing 
List" and voila', I finally got the display I was wanting, or something 
approximating it.

Why on earth did the KDEPIM people decide they had to completely change the 
default look of KMail?? Would it have been so hard to keep the old look as 
the default and let people change and customize it?