The best way to answer your questions is to follow the development more closely day by days, or week by weeks…
It’s probably going to look gibberish but you don’t have to understand everything.
For instance you can check what’s the animation module is working on :
devtalk is a good place to witness what’s going on too :
If you ever worked in a big company you should already have a feel of why these things takes longer than what we could think.
First because it’s much more complex that we might think, and also there is some kind of inertia, devs have a lot on their plate besides doing code, they also need to review a lot of code and do some planning.
Making a movie also takes a lot of time, between the idea and the time it enters in production you can spend a few years in developments and looking for founding, then production takes 1 year or two, and then it might be released 6 months after…
Of course blender development and movie making are two different things, but both a big projects with a lot of people involved. So even when planets are correctly aligned things can still take a lot of time.
An example of that, blender particle system is quite dated, I don’t recall exactly but I think what we have now is some kind of unfinished system made at least 10 years ago. It’s been a while it’s known that a better system should be done.
Currently geometry nodes seems to be the perfect tool for that, but even if a tech savvy artist can do nearly everything the old system was doing + a lot more, it’s probably going to take a few years more until the old system is removed and non tech artists are provided with a friendly interface, similarly to what is done with hair…
I’m wondering why you’ve been a member of BlenderArtists for as long as you have, yet seem to not be familiar with how Blender development evolves.
I’ve only been using Blender for 13 months and I know why bone layers were just now changed. The info and dev notes and related are all out there for anyone to read… so, perhaps start reading all the pages and posts and sites that discuss such things.
Read the release notes of ‘insert app here’ (even the big solutions) and you will always notice what appears to be the very late arrival of a feature you would’ve thought should’ve been there since the beginning. What you thought was pretty solid development planning regardless of software will over time look increasingly full of holes when you start thinking of things in hindsight.
Granted, Blender has seen late arrivals of critical features more often than most commercial solutions, but that is just part of using FOSS so we can at least be thankful it arrived at all (even though Blender’s available development budget has long left shoestring status).
In short, there is no such thing as that software solution that just dominated everyone and did everything perfectly from day one.
Someone may also ask why the menu in every programm is on the top right… when most users are right handed and so have to cross all over the workplace to use any menu entry… ??
Why didn’t have someone the idea to make it optionally rightaligned… ??
If someone ask oneself why some things some wanted to to for some time aren’t done yet… most of the time someone tells other people: i didn’t had the time yet…
I got a good a explanation its no problem for me I want to grow with blender it would be handy as somethings would be have said before I cannot change all my rigged character
rig ui does not work otherwise because bone layers have changed to bone collections.
If I could program it would be no problem but I can not. The characters work until version 3.6.8. I am using blender 2.4 till 2.79b then I switched to 3.1 till 3.6.8 I recently switch to 4.02 and then the animating rigify problems came. But I will fix it.
But… feature changes are also a “problem” with other (payed) apps… even if using a simple office suite…you might get a text file with some slighly higher version number and you see the text differently or even can[t open the text at all…
That’s the reason for LTS versions (again also in other apps)…but still… after some years… you can;t use the older setups and there isn’t even any possibiliy to convert this…
…this said: newer blender versions mostly can read older files… you might want to disable Load UI or even append it…
Also: feature changes are “announced”…
Additionally: if you build up all this by yourself (and not “just used someone else files” ) then you know the principle behinf it… and are able to convert or build this up anew…
Recently someone compared a render from only one year ago… now made with the newer version of blender … reult: fast aaannnd better looking…
…of course there are people who love the 2.79 version and the internal renderer… and luckily enough:
With blender someone can still use this old versions… ( in fact i have a 2.49 version installed on this machine i am typing this… )
Summary: sometimes there are changes “to the better” when someone likes this new ones more… and sometimes… someone things differently about this…
Rigify is a build in add on.
You can rig your own character.
Have you ever done that rigging weight painting add some bone sections like for the face.
In blender 4 only the rig ui does not work.
You have to change the rig ui text file.
Because bone layer are changed to bone collections. After rewrite the rig ui start the script again. Hopefully it should work.
2.79b files will work in 3.6 and that can be opened in 4 but then the rig ui is not working.
Shame
The metarig is long ago removed it was not needed anymore. A new metarig means new bone settings new weightpainting etcetera
Have you ever done rigging ?
Rig ui is needed for the animators.
The rig always worked never got any complains.
But its fixed already i wondered why blender has no workaround not everybody is good in coding.
I am glad they fix there coding now.
I have, which is why I know to never delete the metarig, other then from the ‘final’ linked in character model file, which is an animation/shot ready file made from the very last/latest working file (which of course still has the metarig).
So if any changes are needed, you update/make the next working file and then replace the ‘final’ linked file.
“They” have… because it’s open source people can notify about it in the proper place like for example the Blender GIT Issues adressing Rigify … or the addon category on devtalk…
But because it’s an addon and not maintained by the blender (foundation) developers themself… this may take a while…
In general:
If someone looks into some of this “bug reports” (also in other areas…) there are a lot of this:
wrong place/adress
unmentioned version(s)
unreproducable
already mentioned
already fixed
unreproducable
user never replies
user does some of the aboved mentioned things multiple times
And still… all this is eating up time…
…so someone might reconsider the “idea” of this being so “tedious”… because. …adressing “them”… and for example talking about it in a user forum… (or some public “group”) not looking into devtalk and/or the git issues… (or knowing about it ??) there are a lot of volounteer users spending time for channeling the discussion so the the real developers (core or addon) do use less of their time to “talk” but think and develop…
Of course if someone uses a paid product… then they have the support line… or additonal custom support… paid extra (?)… or respectively: paying so much so that every developer involved into the end product spent her/his whole day to work on this…
<sarcasm>
But it seems for open source some people think they just have to shout out of the window and “the bloody devs” just have to do it… </sarcasm>
Yes… i’m divagating a little and aren’t addressing you specificly…
But again: major version change → possible problems
And luckily especially for blender: someone can use multiple versions simultionsly and there are LTS versions…
or was… 
