The deleted console UI helped you understand the data in the system, get started with it and do some basic admin. But for any real application built on it, you'd need to build some of your own tooling and get acquainted with the mc command line tool. It was a very shallow UI - it didn't help with ACLs where you just had a big box to paste your JSON into.
It also had a lot of asterisks to show you which tabs were premium - at least they were visible.
Now it lets you browse buckets, but not create users? All the premium tabs are gone. If I hadn't used it before this I'd have assumed it was just raw and unfinished.
It's solid software, but the documentation really only covers the happy paths, and there's no community around it.
Annual pricing for the complete package & support is about 75% of Backblaze's, but you have to bring your own hardware and network. I guess it compares much more favorably against S3, or maybe better still if you're going to exabytes.
But yeah this just seems like damage to the on-ramp for people who want to grow into it.