As others, I also feel this is a huge step backwards in usability for Dolphin.
I am older and my vision is not the best. To make matters even worse my memory has also been severely affected as I’ve aged. My media storage locations contain thousands of directories. When I browse upwards, I am completely lost as to what my last directory location was. I wasn’t even aware the last directory is identified by being underlined, as it is far too subtle with my color scheme and poor vision to even notice the distinction.
When I was younger I had a memory like a steel trap and this change in Dolphin’s behavior likely wouldn’t have affected me in such a negative way. Unfortunately, with advancing age and a degraded memory as soon as I’ve left my last directory for even a second I can no longer remember my old location. Using the keyboard is really not a viable option, as this is an HTPC computer and I select and navigate everything via mouse.
Unless you are older and suffer from debilitating vision and memory impairments, you likely can have no appreciation of how severely frustrating and negatively this change affects older KDE users. When I upgraded to KDE 6 not that long ago I assumed this was a KDE 6 bug that would be remedied before too long. It is exceedingly disappointing to now hear that this was a deliberate design change on the developer’s part, and there are no plans to reinstate this usability feature.
I can’t remember exactly how long I’ve been using KDE, but it’s in the 20 year vicinity. I thought KDE was focused on making improvements for vision and hearing impaired users these days, but this seriously makes me wonder about where the KDE development team’s priories lie.