User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Global Navigation January Update/@comment-25005178-20150204224931/@comment-24739709-20150204233722

Hey Strespasult! I wrote this a few pages back about making this change "optional" - I hope it'll help you understand, too.

I get this sentiment, and I empathize with it. From our product/development standpoint, there are a couple reasons why that's a challenge. First, from just a features standpoint: we've moved a couple things around. For example, local and global searches are going to be in the nav now instead of in the body of the wikia. If it were "optional", that would present a problem - where would search be? Would having the classic nav bar revert it to being on the wikia itself, and what effect would that have on the local JS and CSS?

There are a bunch of problems just like that, which leads to the second issue: internally, that would give us two sets of code to maintain. Which means that, anytime we wanted to make a change in the future, we'd have to consider many, many different permutations of layout, design, and function in order to avoid breaking Wikia for folks who chose the "old" option, essentially doubling or tripling the development work for even small upgrades to Wikia.

I hope that helps - I'm happy to answer questions, too.