I think the touch bar was a neat idea with a lot of potential but IMO they should have kept the row of physical function keys as well.
The thing is I have never used the function keys on my laptop so that was not a problem form me, but also some of the custom functions I hard can just be mapped to fn keys so it is bit like it it us a huge loss
Another thing was that not all Mac notebooks had a touch bar, so developers couldn't put any vital features onto it.