My gripe with the touch bar is that for every IDE you have to customise it to see the function keys by default. It's so damn annoying. Why can't the default layout be just the Fn keys ?
Because 95% of the people don't use them and for them having an emoji picker, a volume, brightness control is more useful. The small group of people who actively use the Fn keys can just enable this checkbox at the settings.
Someday they should make a pro model for the 5% of people who don't care about emoji pickers.
I wouldn't hold my breath for a big mainstream corporation to address the needs of 5% of their market share.
And lose touch typing
You can change it to show the F-keys by default in macOS settings. Then by pressing Fn you can view the "special" mode.
"Settings: Keyboard: Touch Bar shows" lets you permanently set to F keys or (my preference) the Extended Control Strip.
> Why can't the default layout be just the Fn keys ?
Because then no software would have used it. (Said ironically)
FWIW, I really hate IDEs (usually ported over from other platforms with little thought) that use function key shortcuts for commonly-used actions. I instantly remap "run" in every IDE to ⌘R.