I don't care for the new interface and I agree that it's slower, but that may just be because I'm not accustomed to the look. GUI changes are minor to me and easily fixed with a greasemonkey script anyway. The real problem is that they stripped out tons of functionality and didn't replace it with anything. Google+ is not integrated. They added a button to share in google+ . That's all. that's not integration. There is no way to get my friend's content on google+ back into google reader.

That is the entire point of sharing in google reader. It's not a 'social network' per se, it's specialization in going through RSS feeds. I find a 'friend' that looks at funny photos all day and he pics out the 10-20 good ones so I don't have to look at funny photos all day. My feeds can be focused around other topics. but this only works if sharing is super easy (like pressing shift + s) and there is some way to get shared content back into my reader.

Without that the social network is completely useless. I might as well be emailing/IMing links to my friends.

I don't mind that they are using google+, but they need to think about this for moment and actually make google+ useful in some way.

This would be roughly analogous to twitter removing hashtags and replies and replacing them with a 'post to Facebook' button. What's the point?