And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes.
Hopefully won’t happen this time.
I'd say that you're in a small enough minority that most people will design right past you, just like most websites have an acceptable minimum percentage of browser feature availability after which you can make that feature a requirement for functionality.
Especially as screens tend to get wider, not thinner.
If you want something really small, perhaps mutt in a terminal could work. :)
And even if we do, having an interface that can work as a square, or a rectangle but vertical (for screens that can rotation 90˚), is also useful.
Not all of us run our apps in full screen (which seems to be quite prevalent in the Windows world), but rather 'tiled' or stacked, sometimes with different windows of different apps overlapping (handy on laptops).