Windows user here. It's not particularly any prettier, and Calc doesn't open CSVs correctly anymore. So yeah, there's that.
Even opening Calc first then using its menu to open a .txt opens the file in LibreOffice Writer!
And then of course Gnome's (on Linux) file browsers no longer support renaming of files in the browsers, so you have to mess around elsewhere.
Watch out, though, for handling CSV files in Excel if you're using an encoding other than ANSI.
Excel for Windows does not correctly write UTF-8 files[1]
Excel for Mac lists 'UTF-8' as an import CSV encoding option but Excel for Mac does not import UTF-8 CSV files[2]
[1]Response from MS employee: "Unfortunately, not all applications can encode files in UTF-8 by default, and Microsoft Excel is one of them." http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_...
[2]Response from MS employee: "Excel for Mac does not currently support UTF-8" -- despite UTF-8 being an option in Excel for Mac http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m...
But it does look like our default option is now UTF-16, there's now a bug logged about this - https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88909
Sorry that your experience wasn't great though :-(
No worries: I'm a developer too; I know these things happen. Given some of the regressions I've been dealing with recently, it was entirely believable that but was in my software -- otherwise I would have cross-checked with something else much earlier!
I appreciate the UI work, but come on, the simple stuff can't break.
So that's a UTF-8 file? Funny it's coming up with UTF-16...
It should just be a US-ASCII file, so yeah, UTF-8 works, while UTF-16 obviously wouldn't.