Actually nobody has asked for the “new column layout”. What I’m looking is where Manager is heading and the old status that captured so much information in so little space was incompatible with upcoming reporting capabilities. You can already see why when you use Advanced Search function. Every column in Manager was of some primitive data type (text, number, boolean, date or enum) but the old status column was amalgamation of both number and enum.
I see this situation as taking one step backwards so we can make two steps forward. Maybe those two steps forward are not obvious now but they will be soon…