Ah, might this - https://evernote.com/blog/see-evernote-like-never-before-with-home/ - explain what to me was such an infuriating and perplexing removal of the hide-note-pane option that totally broke the way I used Evernote? I am still using the previous version of EN simply because of the loss of this option. If this new Home dashboard can be configured such that the only widget on it is a list of all selected notes (via search, tags etc - or all notes if no selection criteria are in place) then that essentially reverts to the legacy setup I am running at the moment so long as whenever I click on a note in the notes widget it opens it in a new window leaving the EN main window still displaying the Home dashboard. In fact this new Home dashboard is probably better than the simple hide-note-pane legacy option because it would give me the ability to have one widget at the very top with a few of my most used notes (e.g. I have a note called "*SCRATCHPAD*" if I want to very quickly jot down someone's number, essentially a virtual PostIt note) and then have my main notes list using the other 90% of the Home display. (I see that EN has explicitly created a "Scratchpad" widget so I would probably use that as a replacement for my "*SCRATCHPAD*" note depending on how the Home functionality transfers to the iPhone and iPad versions.)
If Home can be configured as I hope then that would resolve my concern and get me to switch from the legacy to the latest version. From reading that blog post I'm not sure if the Notes widget can actually display all or selected notes, they only talk about "recent" and "suggested", but if the direction of travel is enhancements to Home then I will certainly be trying out this new feature to see if it gets me close to, totally back to, or maybe even slightly beyond the legacy version in terms of what I consider a clean and efficient screen layout.
I do note however that the blog post says that "If you’re an Evernote Premium or Business customer, you can resize, reorder, or remove widgets to customize your Home" which I assume means non-premium users can't. I'm a premium user so that isn't a concern for me but as a community-minded person it would still feel very wrong to me that Evernote has worsened the user interface for non-premium users who use EN as I do and won't, as far as I can see from reading the blog post, have the possibility of configuring Home to reproduce the previous note-pane-hidden appearance so although I might have an escape route on this one I'm still left a bit perplexed as to why EN removed such a basic option.