That's a matter of opinion
It's restored to something like the way it was, but a little better under control, I think, and that's a feature, not a bug.
The dashboard is an artifact of WordPress's roots as a single blog system, when posting in the back room made sense--the content was produced by a sole proprietorship. But you post in public in a forum, and ultimately I'll be integrating the post form directly into the user interface. You can already get a list of your posts on your author page, and I plan to beef it up to show comments too. I recognize that there are some features of the dashboard that you need as a poster, and I'll bring those out to the user interface. But I'll get rid of the dashboard for all but admins eventually.