I am in the "acceptance" phase of the new LGA and not as much into the debate anymore. I am not a fan, the airport in my mind has removed features I care about (convenience) and added features I don't care about (waterfall, shopping.) But what do I gain by still being annoyed by it - the changes could've certainly been a lot worse, I guess.

I have learned to cope as best as I can - take the shortcut through the mall (i.e., two hard lefts and not follow the main path) to get to the AA gates more quickly, for example.

I would love to see an analysis if this new alleyway space has measurably decreased taxi in/out times. Theoretically it sounds like it should help. In practice I don't think it will because of shifting bottlenecks day to day (and the true bottleneck is the runways.) Anecdotally I haven't seen block times get smaller. If someone did the analysis, I'd guess it saves 1-2 minutes on average per segment which is completely offset by the extra 10 minutes of walking round trip.