This isn't the start of the design problems.

I was sad when I bought a PS5, and saw what a design mess they'd made of the home screen UI. And it didn't grow on me: I still feel dislike, every time I use it.

At first glance, it looked like a combination of letting biz dev take over the UI, plus siloing the work of multiple designers on the skeleton around that, so that there was no coherent overall design, nor intuitive user conceptual model.

Worse, I rarely even see the iconic (in two senses of the term) Sony icon bar now.

(Which iconic bar, incidentally, I understand they've also shrunk the active icon for in a PS5 update, presumably to make more room for ads and the piles of noisy Times Square "engagement". Plus they made it modal, perhaps for more ad space, so there's two bars, and a clumsy way to get between them, depending on whether you want games or video streaming.)

But I don't even see the main iconic bar(s) anymore, because the UI usually leaves me in the ugly alternate "lower" bar, which doesn't even have a cue that the main iconic bar exists.

(Which, incidentally, you might not know you can get out of with a long press, not a normal press, on the logo on the controller. Which logo, incidentally, in previous consoles, used to look like a button.)

This lower bar you're stuck in by default has an annoying and surprisingly ugly recent-task-switcher-like interface that's especially ugly and clumsy to use, with submenus you don't want there.

Also, turning off (rest mode) console running Netflix, when going to bed, used to be quick muscle memory with the TV controller. Now it's an extended interactive adventure.

Then there's the Web version of the PlayStation store getting more unusable with each re-design. If you can find what you want, there's pretty obviously a flaky underlying data model with a lot of special cases, and the UI has never sufficiently abstracted over that, nor reliably. Even every PS+ monthly release is a coin-toss of what time it will be pushed, in which UIs, and with a good chance of bugs in that process.

C'mon, Sony, we really want to love you, but you make it so difficult. The "Play" in PlayStation should be for fun and relaxation. And when we game, our controller and overall the UX should be a "elegant weapon" of the hero. Not aggravation, bureaucracy, and the impression of being bent over for every jerky marketing program. It's like you're subconsciously making a WorkStation for an especially toxic and dysfunctional company.