SL viewer 2.0: Old wine on a shiny new bottle?

So the SL viewer 2.0 Launched. If LL's motive was to make new users stay in SL, I believe that launching the new viewer will only help with a tiny fraction of the barriers people have to cross to start using Second Life:

• Wanting to play SL at all: the name could be the biggest showstopper because it’s not really cool these days to want a second life. Attaining a second one is like admitting that you do not have a 1st. However, enhancing your first life with access to 80k international contacts a day is cool. SL makes it possible to meet new people way easier than it would happen on Facebook, Myspace, flickr etc. The cool is also international meetings without the costs of hotels and flight tickets. And so is being able to bring your teachings etc. to the world, not just the local community. But SL has a reputation of adultery, cybersex and losers hangout, that needs to be dealt with. As long as even LL themselves concieves the users to be losers (aka in Philip Lindens quote), then how will this ever change?
• Visual appeal: Compared to all other games and platforms today SL looks crappy, ugly, broken, flat, and the beginner avatars are ugly. It oozes a complete lack of style. If possible LL really ought to redefine the choice of noob avatars at least.
• Hardware support: Why is it so difficult to get SL to run proper on a laptop? When you can run a world that looks exactly like SL on an iPhone?
• Registration: Some has complained on the web that the registration process is a barrier, but it really runs as smooth as most other registrations on the web. The only point of annoyance is that you cannot choose your name freely. Or change your name later on.
  

SL is new world, and when you start getting to know the place you kind of get through phases in your SL life:

Baby-phase: To be staying in SL beyond this phase is where many people give up. The learning curve here is estimated to be 20 hours in duration, but, that is roughly the same time used on other online multiplayer 3d worlds like wow, eve online, etc. This is where the new UI might be helpful. Also a kind of mentor program would be helpful ; )

Teen-phase: Connecting with people, Finding your way around to connect with people and explore, Party! Now proper group functions, communication tools, working friends-lists, being able to be more than 20 avatars on a sim without experiencing glue environment and sim stalls each time an aavatar TP’s in or out, a working search, working maps, slurls and TP’s etc. are needed. Looking at LL bugtracker, the JIRA, this is exactly where most tools fails! And why not implement the tools that makes it easy to communicate an navigate in an international virtual world like spellchecking, translator, area search and inbuilt radar. Emerald has done that already.

Grownup-phase: some has now found out what they like to do in SL, so now is the need to connect with others with the same interests and the need for specialised tools for builders, artists, fashion makers, community leaders, snapshotographers, etc. It would be so nice to have specialized and well designed applications, for example a snapshot one, with all functions for that: Windligt, draw distance, snapshot functions, etc. in one menu like the build tool.

To me the viewer 2.0 is nothing but old wine in a shiny new bottle. It’s a pretty bottle, and maybe a small step in the right direction, especially if all the bugs and bad decisions gets fixed. Let's hope I am wrong about expecting LL to simply fix some minor bugs, and then launch the 2.0. Let’s hope they really have changed, and that that will eventually change LLs reputation.