TL;DR:
Got a little excited by typing my feedback.
They had to do this as a marketing point of view, but the way they brought it, or did some things are just not good at all.
p.s: no hate on mie grammar pl0x me Dutch.
For everyone who is complaining about it, they had to.
Every server playercount is dropping, they get a lower income, and they still have to pay the full amount for all the extra lobbies and unused games. I get their point of view in a marketing perspective for sure, after all they're still a company.
The way how they brought this update, let's just say it couldn't be worse. You should have announced it way back, and have done it in small steps starting to announce a game removal for example. Not just, SIKE WIPED ALL OF YOUR FAVORITE GAMES. As I said, it's a company after all, I get that, but you wouldn't be one without a community, and by doing this you just show no interest in player feedback, since there hasn't even been a single public discussion about this.
I've asked multiple staff members their honest opinion and even they said they dislike parts of it a lot.
I get it, I get it, you can't just base everything on community feedback. And yes the average age is slowly decreasing so you're trying to make it more easier, but this is still Java and not Bedrock. We don't want 100 players with a quadrillion particles in 1 small place in a lobby, it's just badly structred in my opinion, you could have kept the server selector, and made portals further away from eachother and let that server selector teleport you to the game it's portal, in that way you could have added holographic leaderbords, villagers as shops, multiple NPCs (example EggWars team modes), or anything. This just feels like you're slowly forcing Java players to have the same bedrock experience, but we don't play on small little iPads, we play on a PC with a keyboard and a mouse, moving around is so much easier and faster, so no, we don't want NPCs right in front of our face.
It just feels sooo poorly designed and not even any back-up thought on it, yeah you can add back games in a 'rotation queue', but what's the point of removing it then, or even playing it if it's temporary, you removed games that weren't even dead.
As a developer myself, I know it's hard to find the perfect balance in community feedback, but atleast try to listen to it, and not ignore every fact of it, I'm sure some people like it, but I can guarentee you atleast 50% of the players think it's bad.
It's also mostly just getting used to, but getting used to this small, rushed, and just 0 detailed structure will make more players quit then trying to get used to it.
Like I said, my best option would be, spread it out the lobby, bring back the selector and make a lobby with a small place for every gamemode rather then just pushing NPCs in front of our faces, or atleast, for the sake of everything, move back the NPCs atleast 20 blocks...
It does look more organized in some ways, but like, the shop, leaderbords, statistics, it's all so poor, and so basic, and so not CubeCraft. I'm not trying to roast the management or anything, but like this just feels like you did whatever you wanted, in the fastest and easiest way possible. You could have done a little more on working things out, giving it a little twist, making it look more exciting, but nope, you just did everything in once, and gave us a lot less in return.
I stopped playing Minecraft a while back, but I always followed the process of CubeCraft, and it was finally moving in a good direction (i.m.o) with the Arcade update, the new beta gamemode lobby, and everything, and then out of no where you take away most of the players their playing experience and just make it feel less fun to be at the server in general.
This update could have been so much more, with the same way of working, you can combine an easy experience with a good looking detailed strucutre, trust me. At points like this I just get upset about choices CubeCraft is choosing to do. I'd love to see CubeCraft going a more proffesional direction like this with a less messy structure, but don't take that too serious by removing every little detail you ever had. And if you do not have the man power to do that, open the Jr. Developer process again, it was such a good project, recruit Jr Builders for example, just use the Junior project in general, they're all free anyways.
I agree on the NPCs, good job on that, the Armorstands just looked, yeah, bad. Also using NPCs in the Mainlobby is a +1 from me as well, it looks really smooth, with the banners behind it as well, just wrongly positioned at the lobbies rn i.m.o
In general, good update, way too less thinking behind the structure. I like the idea behind it, but as explained in this message, could have added some more details, and made it more cubecraftish.