I think @steveoath’s comment is worth more introspection. Completely aside from this product, but decidedly related to it, is this point. They ended up in a weird position. They made two music Products that are well loved, but you can only make so many music Products?
It’s hard to make a v2 without making everyone with a v1 feel bad.
I’m not suggesting their capitalism is altruistic, but I do have a kind of respect for a design firm making something else without an eye towards selling you the next version. I see this more as another part of their attempt at an escape route. They have always been a Design Firm 
, they happened to find success making music devices. There is a degree of music nerds wanting more music things, but there is also a degree of them needing to play a different game to market to a different space that directly conflicts with the sensibilities of some of their existing customers.
But it also has a degree of gross and bad? It’s like how I find bananas to smell putrid and others do not. Once you’re over “The Big Apple Lie”, I think you develop a sensitivity to that. @dianus rightly cited the absurd deification of specific figures within design who are there as a result of intense amounts of myth making about their actual personal contributions. Rams and Ive have had their names stamped on the work innumerable talented designers and engineers who worked under them, and they’ll happily name the most prominent of those folks, but that myth doesn’t sell well. The man myth made Edison, and it made Apple. (And to be clear, TE isn’t pitching a mythic designer, but they’re using the marketing language of those that do.)
Which is to say: this has a lot of heat on because of the forces they’ve invoked to sell their future garbage, and in this world, that look is going to start looking worse and worse. We all relate to this differently, but given where lines sits, we’re actually very stuck at the nexus of who has very strong feelings about this.
