Cumbersome and finicky = True
But less cumbersome and finicky than not having it. It performed well as an "archive" of all of the shortcuts installed by all of the vendors, that never had to be changed except to add to it. Start menu pinning and taskbar pinning served for excellent quick-access.
The way to use it was to find your common use items in the archive once, then promote them to a more accessible space. Now we only have the more accessible space and no archive (unless we add it) which forces the accessible quick-access space to be very cluttered.
On my Win8 "laptablet" I have installed three apps so far: Firefox, about half of the Adobe Master Collection, and Houdini. The "All Apps" screen is very cluttered, since it doesn't collapse anything. It's pretty much what you'd get if you expanded all levels of the Start Menu simultaneously and just had it scroll. If I had that on my desktop, I imagine it would be completely unusable with my typical loadout.
Since the "All Apps" section is very large and difficult to find things in, due to not collapsing things I'm not interested in seeing at the moment, I'll have to put anything I want to access on the home screen. Even with my light loadout, that is currently very cluttered as well and already in need of major cleanup and reorganization, but reorganization is slow when things are on opposite sides of where they should be.
So, I've owned this system for just over a month and installed software from three developers, and it already feels cluttered. If the system is this disorganized and cluttered on a fresh system, with a basic loadout for a user who knows how and is willing to spend the time organizing, the interface concept is bad.
