Who made the call on the search bar location change??!!? Whoever made the call forcing that on outlook users should be let go immediately for not listening to logical arguments from the community.
People in my org are pretty young and are good at adapting to change (as am I). I can guarantee you they are going to freak out over this if there is no way to put the UI back to the way it was before. The search feature is useless after this "upgrade." 100% unintuitive and frustrating to use. That is also not an opinion. It is obviously the judgement of your user base. Start listening to your users and stop pushing **bleep**ty UI changes like this because you are trying to kill the ribbon.
Thank goodness I set our update channel to semi annually to avoid dumpster fires like this for as long as possible. MS knows best. What a joke. Test group for this must have been people that don't use the software AT ALL.
-admin that gets you sales income