[drc500free]

That's super interesting, because to me the new one literally looks like a captcha! It would be completely unusable with careful perusal, let alone glancing down while navigating. The words all have lines of nearly the exact same color overlayed so I can't read them without squinting and going letter by letter.

I found out several years ago that I have some form of color blindness - amusingly enough during a design review for a map we were designing. I had the exact same problem, with everything bleeding together in an indistinguishable mass, and everyone looking at me like I had 3 heads when I asked how we could possibly ship something so unusable with no contrast.

I suspect there is something similar going on here. To me, the foreground text and background roads are nearly identical in hue and saturation. Is it high contrast to other people? The map I struggled with years ago was using two colors with similar saturation but different hues (a purple and a green/yellow), so I had to push to make sure that "high contrast" meant a difference in both hue AND saturation.

Shipping a couple map-related products has given me a real appreciation for how differently users can experience visual layouts. For one thing, technical people generally like maps a LOT more than the general population does, to the point that we take it for granted that it's the ideal way of presenting anything with a position component.

Quite a lot of people get overwhelmed by maps - they basically shut down and can't figure out the UI at all. Looking at the new version gave me that panicked feeling that I hear those users talk about.

[fouc]

when I hear "captcha" I think of mostly black text on white background. The text is made hard to read by distorting the font, and possibly drawing a line through it.

So I find your analogy of "literally looks like a captcha" to be confusing.

[drc500free]

To me that's what it looks like (minus the text distortion). The color of the roads is nearly identical to the color of the text, so it's text with a bunch of random lines going through it so that I can't easily read it. From other people's reactions, I suspect color blindness at play here.

Are the roads and text very different colors to you, so that you can easily read the text?