Frustrating as it is that GOG forcibly turns their Galaxy users into guinea pigs, is there any reason at all to use it?

As far as I can tell, the GOG.com web interface still works normally, no?

Oh, I see. If you download a game, it will still launch Galaxy to (try to) install it.
And fail.

Sigh!

Then I guess I'll have to try to demand a refund of my entire library, since it's no longer accessible to me...

Website is still working normally and offline installers still work without Galaxy; for the time being!
Hoping this will remain like so forever!
Fingers crossed!

I love GOG, but 2.0 is arguably a lot less functional than just using the web-interface.

Make sure in task mgr. that galaxy web app and galaxy helper are running. If not resart app. see if this helps. It did me after last update.

How so? The only main difference between GoG 1 and 2 is UI, barring a few missing tabs for the community forums, etc. Functionally I personally prefer the layout of 2.0 and how customizable the entire application is. The issue comes down to whether or not you're willing to put in the 10 minutes it takes to learn how it all works.

the whole tagging system is missing ...

No, it's not. Right click on any game, go to the assign tags option, go down to the Tags list(if you haven't made any), and type in the tag for the game. Any tag you type will then be available for any other game you want to use it for. It's not the most intuitive system at the moment, but it's definitely there. That's not even taking into consideration that the app already has filters for a pretty generic set of genres.

It would literally be illegal to do this in a signficant number of countries. And they will have people successfully refunding their entire game library on the ground that they've turned Galaxy 2.0 into DRM by doing so. This would make their "DRM-free" promise, which is a platform-selling promise for a vast majority of their customers, false advertising.

So there WILL always be a way to obtain your DRM-free games actually DRM-free.

Frankly i don't why felt they needed make Gog Galaxy into a multi platform platform. There already apps for windows that already dose this. If they wanted make there own. They should have made it separate form Galaxy. Gog Galaxy was fine the way it was.

So you keep saying and I can only say: "I sincerely hope so!"
I've been here before GOG, when they were called Good Old Games, so for long time and over the years many things which I didn't think possible happened and hardly anyone blinked an eye.

I just bought a game because I had a code that let me get it for a buck.

It showed up in my library on the website fine, but does not show up in Galaxy 2.0. This seems to be related to the stats on my games only updating once every day or two (such as accurately tracking which games have been recently played).

I can make the games show up by quitting galaxy and restarting it to force it to update it statistics, but man what a pain. I'm seriously considering just going back to using offline installers downloaded directly from the website.

yes, it is. you're talking about some new form of tags. not about the gog tagging system that is available on the website and the client for years.

Interestingly, as much as it is lacking core GoG functionality compared to the previous launcher, it's Steam integration is quite good. It shows me significantly more information available through the Steam API that the Steam client itself for some reason is incapable of providing, like which of my games would run in Linux/SteamOS without having to actually start the Steam client on Linux itself. It also shows, for some games at least, what level/subgame/zone within a game people on my contact list are at, whereas the Steam client just shows the game they are playing.

My friend list (the new one) still shows the areas in games that friends are in when they're playing.

Ability to view linux and SteamOS compatibility on Windows was available in older versions of the Steam library, but is one of many notably-absent features with the updated client (which is also causing medical problems for a number of users with Valve having known about the problem for at least 6 months and refused to deal with it).

So yeah, GOG Galaxy 2.0 is an objectively better Steam than Steam is, but an objectively worse GOG Galaxy than 1.2 was... Good job, GOG...