Comment by jjice

I feel like the discoverability for less screen real estate tradeoff is a bad one for a product that you're going to use regularly. Something like Gmail is not a one-off used by an individual, so if it takes 4 times longer to find something that'll take 5 seconds the first time, I really don't think that's a good trade off.

I think it's completely okay to expect someone to have to learn a UI/UX if it is better in the long run (assuming it's not a product that gets used twice a year).