I personally would prefer an opaque reward chart and a useful search function, to a "fixed" 5-column chart when I can't find the actual flights because delta.dumb is useless.
In my very limited experience, I think the search has improved dramatically. I recently had cause to search SFO-BEG and return and found routings involving Aeroflot. I think that in the past only Air France, KLM, and Alitalia showed up on searches. I know that in the past I had to search each year for a round trip from North America to Bucharest, and it took a zillion phone calls because Tarom (the Romanian flag carrier) wasn't part of the DL search engine.