RPN programmability moved backwards?

[David Hayden]

I was perfectly happy with my 41CV purchased around 1981, so I missed all the calculator fun from 1981 until about 2006 when I got a 50g to see what HP had been up to.

Over the past few days I did some programming on the 35s and found it much harder than the 41C (or DM42 or WP-34s). Only 26 labels, each consisting of just one letter, just two, hardcoded, indirection registers, cumbersome code if you want both direct and indirect access to registers. Yuck...

Looking through my manuals, it seems that this started with the 32s in 1988.

Does anyone know why HP took this course of reduced programmability? Maybe people just weren't writing programs as much? Certainly the non-programmable functionality git better and better and the RPL machines are highly programmable, but the RPN calcs seemed to go backwards rather than forwards.

Dave