Our initial take: Some of the added structure will prevent less experienced programmers from making a mess, but we worry it may potentionally increase the price of entry past many people Drupal 7 was such a good fit for.
We recently had our first glance at Drupal 8 back in October. We've loved Drupal for a long time for it's ability to wear a lot of hats well. Good enough for The White House (yes THAT one) & Weather Channel, yet provide a robust data management scheme coupled with one of the meanest content delivery systems for getting your site visitors exactly what they were looking for and deliver as little or as much as they wanted to digest.
What made it so powerful to us was it's hybrid approach to programming architecture. It allowed us to do quick and dirty when that is all the client really needed, but on the flip side, when it got time to clean up that mess, Drupal had very robust options for taking that quick and dirty code and turning it into very maintainable long lasting code.
The new code seems much stricter. Good if you are building a large enterprise level application, not so good if you're looking for the magic software that gives you enterprise level features without breaking the bank. We really hope we are wrong. Despite being nerds, we've yet to find anything compelling beyond Windows XP. Sometimes newer isn't always better. Even software can be a work of art, Drupal 7 was, it was the same work of art Microsoft Access was 10-15 years ago.
Much more to come on this subject...
