apple have completely lost the plot, and organisations of that size are incapable of producing good user experience w/o a de facto dictatorship person who has an idea what here doing (a la steve jobs)
this is worsened by the the fact that even on hn people have no idea what's they're doing in terms of design most of the time, because they fail to realise that the average person isn't like a fan of their product lol, they just see it as a utility that needs to perform a bare minimum of functions reliably, with a consistent ui, like thats literally it...
every time you want to change something, ask yourself, if I show this to my grandma, and unless her reaction is "omg yes this is a million times better, pls do that" DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING
I dislike smooth scroll (and many other UI animations), but there are other things that might help, such as:
- Xaw scroll bars; click to scroll so that the clicked position is now at the top of the screen.
- Line numbers.
- Marker for bottom and top of previous scroll position, if what was previously on the screen is still visible.