'There seemed to be a recurring message that ancestry customers who preferred the old search functionality needed to "just spend some time learning how to use the new search functionality effectively".'

Agreed, most times with Old Search you would get a good match at the first try.

Most times with New Search, at the first search you either get no matches or hundreds of completely irrelevant matches. You then have to spend quite a few minutes fiddling with the search to see if you can get a match. I don't see that as progress.

One continuing annoyance is particularly noticeable when searching place of birth. You have choice of 'Exact', that requires the exact same combination of town, county, country but people rarely enter the complete town, county, country so you are often dependant on Ancestry's interpretation of what they have written. You can do a 'Broad' search but that will find just about anything starting with the same letter. I want to search on the name of the town or village and nothing else - 'TOWN*' does not work.

In the past I would rarely enter any more than the name of the name of town for this reason.

Ancestry to be too obsessed with combining several fields into one field rather than allowing searches on just one of those fields.