Man what a huge downgrade for widgets in general, but the News widget has to be the epitome of downgrade. I'm just hoping against hope that we can keep the old widgets page/format for 3rd party widgets.
Edit: Just wanted to double down for those disagreeing, the new widgets SUCK. I'll even tell you why:
1) Primarily because they are dumbed down so much, I get that the entire point of iOS is dumbing things down (oh excuse me, I mean simplifying), but I still prefer the older widgets with more information and functionality to them.
2) The new widgets lost the ability to be rolled up, this was priceless as it saved so much space when widgets were rolled up and still showed some information.
3) The news widget in particular keeps redirecting me either to the top stories (or whatever category I have) or to the front page, the old widget would direct me back to the story I was previously reading. Although part of this may be the utterly crappy way iOS handles refreshing background apps, if I'm away from the News app for a little while it just completely resets and I lose the story I was on.
4) They made the side gutters wider, again losing valuable space on the widget
5) I have more gripes, but they are specific to each widget. For example battery widget doesn't show percentage anymore in compact mode, and compact mode forces 4 icons even if you have less batteries to display.
My desire all these years was for iOS to match what Android widgets used to be like a few years ago, but instead we just get these little dumbed down, overly large snippets of information that you can't really interact with, many of them just stupid in design such as the battery widget with empty slots. At this point I'd be happy if devs didn't jump on board and kept their old widgets alive. OK /rant, continue to disagree, the more the better.