I agree with a lot of what you said but the app launcher was dumb. It was just the iPhone’s Home Screen ported to Mac.

Spotlight is way faster than that when you’re at a keyboard. I barely even use the dock, just command space and type in the first few letters of the program I want. Clicking is for people with too much time on their hands.

It is for finding a program or quickly browsing what apps are installed when I don’t know the name. I find it useful in an unfamiliar machine. Yes, like most people, I launch apps primarily with Spotlight.