Why, when wordpress redesigns their drafting page, do they always get rid of the word counter down at the bottom? And why does the drafting box always shrink?

The word counter is a thing I’m constantly concerned with (because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but like faculty meetings at my school, I tend to run a little bit long). Especially for my fiction, which I’m working on getting tighter, but for my everyday posts, I’m making an effort to keep things concise. Wasted words are wasted time, and I don’t like wasting my time or anybody’s who reads the site. Without that counter, I can feel myself (already even within this post, and the parentheticals aren’t helping) adding words in one after another just by dint of the fact that nobody’s there to stop me, and no word counter is there to shame me.

And the layout. I swear, the webpage is using about 50% of my monitor’s horizontal space to display the text box, with great blank swathes down either side of the page, like they mowed the center of the yard down nice and neat but left the sides on “jungle” setting. Add in the toolbar creeping from the top and I can see my words taking up about 33% of the available space.

33% of the space, when the words are all I care about.

Did I accidentally tweak a setting? Or has wordpress just “fixed” my “problems” for me?