Doing things only in response to popular vote, @DTLow, is not a good policy. We can see that in US and UK politics right now. 🙂
The design worked fine before EN took an arbitrary decision to suddenly hide an important interface element several clicks deep. I am guessing it was motivated by a desire to standardise between the iPad and iPhone versions even though there was ample screen-space on the iPad to keep these functions at the surface. It was a silly decision that could easily, at the time, have been reversed.