Also a liquid glass hater, but for what it's worth, 27 is supposed to make it a little bit better. I would prefer to go back to what I had before I had to upgrade into this horrible UI, but this is better than nothing.
I've been running the 27 beta and it fixes so much of the ugliness I hated in Tahoe. Lots of places had toolbars restored, solid areas that indicate where the window can be grabbed. The shitty icon spam in menus is back to sanity. And window corner radii are consistent and less bulbous.
macOS 17 is decisively faster on my MacBook Air M1 16 GB than macOS 26/27 is on my MacBook Pro M2 Max 32 GB. And I don’t mean just the animations themselves but lag/sluggishness/responsiveness in general.
You can already turn off most glass effects in 26 via "System Settings => Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency".
I had that turned off years ago (for reasons I don't remember), and was wondering what all the fuzz was about when 26 came out because I didn't see much of a difference ;)
IMHO the actual important visual changes in the 27 beta is that rolls back the bizarre oversized corner radius in Finder windows, and they also got rid of the 'every menu item must have an icon' idea.
Also on the beta. Agreed. Definite visual and UX improvement over 26, fixing the most egregious issues with 26 implementation of Liquid Glass, but maybe not quite as good as 25 overall.
As long as the UI improves and I can ignore all the AI stuff they're starting to push through, that's fine with me, though like many longtime macOS users, I'm not holding my breath for a bug-free experience.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a Baltimore Oriole (a cool-looking bird, not a baseball player) in my yard. They aren't rare, per se, but they are uncommon.
Took my iPhone out to snap a picture, and pressed the camera button. I hadn't used it, since upgrading to 26.
It takes the picture. It's there. I can see it, but it won't let me save it. Instead, it wants to tell me about the cool new voice-activated AI retouch feature. There was no way to save.
I probably could have figured it out, but I was so furious, I just nuked the picture.
For those of us older than just 10 years of using macOS, the older Apple OSes have instilled within us the desire to never install the X.0 release and wait until at least the X.1 release. The bug-free experience is a myth