Experts often do forget their own "beginner's journey", but I honestly never remember struggling with where windows do appear in Emacs. Either because I never had any eccentric expectations of how this should work, or maybe because I had far bigger issues back in my beginnings. Maybe I didn't notice anything until I found Spacemacs, which had just started gaining some traction back then. I don't remember if they've done anything to improve beginner experience, but then, moving off Spacemacs I might have gotten annoyed, which iirc forced me to understand display-buffer-alist. And then trying Doom, I believe I had to explicitly disable all their novice-aimed improvements and rely on display-buffer-alist settings I was already comfortable with. So, I guess it's a difficult balancing game - need to make it intuitive for the beginners, while not screwing it up for the experts. I mean, if Emacs v32-33 ships with "improvements" that somehow mess with my display-buffer-alist, I'd probably get mad for like two minutes. But that's me, if anything like that to happen, I'm sure it will generate some 2000-message-long discussion thread on emacs.devel.