You just need to ask the community how they feel about the progress made thus far and you will quickly learn how disappointed people are. They are expecting UI/UX changes to be made that allow the wallet to be easier to use which will lead to greater adoption. Instead we get a bunch of resolved bugs, but very few design changes that offer a better user experience.
People really need to do more research on the contents of worker proposals then before they vote perhaps? Big new exchange redesigns and user studies are great, but maintenance of the current released codebase is highly important & it's not a task covered by either of the new Bitshares exchange redesign workers which push their own maintenance off to future worker proposals.
I know the reference wallet is supposed to present all features offered, but why not bring back a well designed "Easy" wallet version?
There is the 'basic' web view mode, and there are several android wallets with simple interfaces, if you don't think such work is out of scope of this worker proposal, then why not raise an issue on bitshares-ui requesting such a feature and perhaps offer to complete the bounty yourself?
I've recently discovered that they lacked designers and developers which explains why certain things fell off the table, but the lack of transparency only made our negative perception that much worse. Let's see what Startail and his team can do during the coming months.
I don't think it's fair to claim there's a lack of transparency - what do you specifically refer to? I find the operation of bitshares-ui repo maintenance by this worker proposal highly transparent & the workers easily contactable. If you go on the bitshares-ui github repo then you can see everything this worker is doing, check the issues, commits, branches, pull-requests and the project boards to see what's happening & if an issue you're interested in has no traction then voice such concerns in the issue.
Your exchange redesign concerns/criticisms would be most appropriately voiced in the following bitshares-ui exchange redesign github issue:
https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1477