I totally understand your thoughts and concerns. I think the structure of the Panel makes a lot of sense (of course I’m biased :)) and is very close to a lot of the standard stuff you already know, but the lack of documentation is still a problem. I want that to be as good as the rest of the docs for the core, but it needs more time to get there. I’m already working on it and hope to publish the first set very soon.
There are also a lot of connection points built in there for developers. There’s a new API to create routes, modals and views for fields. The widget API is a lot more powerful and custom panel pages are coming with the next release. But again all this stuff needs to be documented. I’m on it 