arcsolutionsinc - I am going to take a guess that you are North of 40 years old as your statement seems more like a gripe than fact.
A. The ribbon works perfectly fine, it takes a few hours of your time to work a little slower until you are comfortable with where things are and are usually kept together within the ribbon. For example if you want to modify a drawing then all the tools are located under modify. Also workflow goes left to right.
B. Agreed the ribbons do narrow the workspace but only if you leave them there, you can dock them to the sides of the screen if you prefer and no matter where you dock ribbons (or classic buttons) it will reduce your working area regardless of whether it is classic or ribbon. Thre is also the autohide function.
C. "Speed users" in my experience tend to use keyboard short keys as they have a hand free to do so (unless you have a 2 handed mouse) and this functionality is still there. and hand eye co-ordination only works one way... you see, you touch.
D. Autoesk made this change partly because Microsoft changed their GUI but also partly because of improvements in computing/Hardware/Programming.
Autodesk do have architects, engineers, designers etc working and testing for them as they have a Beta release program where anyone can sign up and critique the new releases before they are officially release to the public. Further to this, yes there is a big wish list for all Autodesk products but they do not have unlimited resourse and some of these requests are out of the realms of current programming, so they do try as much as possible to bring these into the new releases but they are limited by time and resource. If there are ideas you want to see in new releases then go to the development center and give them Kudos points as the higher the Kudos the more likely it is you will see it in the new releases.
The point here is that time moves on, improvements are made and not to everyones liking but that is the price of progress. I have been and ACAD user for 14 years and an Inventor user for 13 years and as the latter I have to say you are lucky they still have the classic at all. Inventor users got 2 releases with both classic and ribbon and then it was ribbon only. This was an annoyance at first but within a couple of days I was back up to speed and I truly believe the ribbon is an improvement.
I suggest al those set in their classic ways put asside some time to use the ribbons and start to migrate over because I doubt AutoCAD will continue programming 3 times per function (Text/Classic/Ribbon).... That or get the pencil and T-square out of retirement as that is where we would be if we all disapproved of change (especially change that IS an improvement once you give it a real chance).
If you still do not believe me then try creating an array in classic and then use the ribbon.... I know which I prefer.