With some many missing features in JSM, why spend time to mess up and degrade navigation?! The new UI is so poor and confusing. The old UI was great! Please give us the option to choose which UI to use!
This has been discussed at some length here. A lot of users don't seem to care much about the change, probably based on how they use Jira/JSM. Some seem to like it, and others hate it. It's hard to know the breakdown. I'm not aware of any public user survey about this but Atlassian noted low opt-out rates during the EAP as evidence that users are happy with it.
After reading some of Atlassian's posts and some short discussions with them, I do not really understand why they think the new nav is better. These posts might give context for future readers:
Unfortunately most of these do not really directly say WHY Atlassian have made the change.
I posted earlier to express my feelings on the matter.