P: Transform/Resize is constrained by default - Want ability to go back to legacy behavior

Following you I suggest something close to Properties panel like Preferences panel that we can customize to our needs to keep there only those preferences we're not sure / aware how they got set, or we often change (that would be too inconvinient to do that fastly by regular Preferences where we have to look for certain ones amongst all of them).

<<I agree that those engineers do not use Photoshop at all,>>

And I'm fairly certain that's just not true.  The engineers do use PS. You're not thinking high enough. The guys that help us out here in the forum are not just glorified help line workers, either. They know what they're doing.

But in a big corporation with millions of customers, you get a management that is supposed to be expert in some things—statistics and demographics for Marketing, for instance, or finance—not in any of these apps. And they sit near the top of the food chain. They are trying their best—I'll say because I have no reason to believe otherwise—to figure out what people are asking for all over the world, or at specific locations that they think are "typical," or looking at the competition to see what people like there— and anything that the engineers and product managers would like to do has to get past Marketing and Finance, at the very least. Someone has to okay the cost and someone has to agree they can sell it to the public (or stockholders).

I am willing to guess that some of these features meet the broadest wish list of the greatest number of users, and meets their timetable (that I wish they would ignore more often), and comes in at or under budget for a first pass. Then they get very real feedback, and now the engineers have something solid to take back to those on high and try to get permission to "fix" or enhance it. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but taking it out on the rank and file seems to me to not be seeing that there's a whole lot of people involved better placed than engineers and product managers to call the shots.

As for "visionaries," I've never met one of those. Are they like faeries and leprechauns?  <g>

Actually there are five posts in this theard about PSUserConfig.txt, and five more links to Adobe changes. But never too many when this discussion is still growing and new comers can't read it from beginning.

Thank you for linking to your topic. These Photoshop section forum is so busy for past week that the latest topics I see on main page are just few hours long. So that is not possible to find enough time to browse all of them!

I agree that those engineers do not use Photoshop at all, simply realise great plan of those others that have some ideas what to change in Photoshop that was interesting to purchase / download it. Too bad Adobe visionaries don't use Photoshop as well 😞

The version of Text Edit I'm using in High Sierra, 1.13, will NOT save a simple .txt text file. You can easily do this in Word, set your margins to zero, save it and put in the appropriate folder. This not only fixed Free Transform but it also fixed the Crop Tool. How hard would it have been for Adobe to put a check box in the Option Bar which toggled this tiny text file on or off. Definitely pass this on to your friends and co-workers and pretty much anyone you care about

And as for Jeffrey deleting my earlier post due to language, all I can say is for his company to not so screw up the product that is so p&ss#s us off that that is the only way we can tell then how frustrated we are and how freaking lame they are. Do they even get it?

The tech support supervisor kept defending it by saying they included notes about these changes. Funny, I have yet to see these notes, and even if I had them available, I didn't have time to read them since the forced upgrade was Adobe's attempt to "fix" a corrupt preferences file (which, BTW, it didn't).

It's not clear he even understood that he was basically saying "well, we changed it to make it better and we posted some vague note somewhere about the changes, so that's your problem".

I had to explain that it was like switching the gas and brake pedals on the latest model Camry and mentioning it on a post-it note somewhere, and then acting surprised when they get a pile-up of new cars where they drive off the factory line.

A true "but ours goes to 11" moment...

Okay: 

ME TOO.

Hey, guys at Adobe: STOP F*CKING WITH THE DAMN INTERFACE!

Change for the sake of change is NOT a good thing.

THANKS for reminding me of ANOTHER nuisance. 

I can't hide that stupid grid without hiding guides.

Best I can do is view the grid lines as dots to make them less distracting, but better if we can simply hide the damn grids by default.

Though having a preference is usually a good thing, I still prefer having more exposed on the Options bar. I have a visual clue as to how I last "set" my preference, I can toggle it on and off, I am way less likely to think something is "broken" just because I've forgotten a preference.

So I wish Adobe would put more of those preferences on the Options bar. They gave us the narrow bar option, and that leaves plenty of room even with my laptop. If they'd do what others do and put all those align and distribute icons into a simple drop down with the icons, they'd even have a ton of room left over when the Move tool is active.

I want more prefs, not less, but having more of them in my workspace is better than having to hunt for them. I think the majority of users don't even look at their preferences, so it should be obvious by now that's a terrific backup, but more exposure for the ones we commonly need in a context-sensitive setting like the Options bar or even the Properties panel would be even better.