People wouldn't be so up in arms about MagSafe vs. USB-C if they had a choice, either by both ports being on the laptop or by being able to choose one or the other when the laptop is ordered.
You can classify MacBook users into two groups: people who hook up their laptops to lots of stuff, and people who don't. The people who hook up their laptop to lots of stuff are the kind of people who get to work, hook up their laptop to power + keyboard + mouse + headphones + maybe Ethernet + maybe other peripherals, at a desk where all this stuff is static. For those people, USB-C is a major improvement over MagSafe. The odds that your power cable is going to be tripped over with proper cable management at your desk is vanishingly small and the convenience gained by only plugging in one cable is enormous.
On the other hand you have the people who bring their laptops and power adapters with them to Starbucks or the university library or their co-founder's apartment, and are constantly looking for a power socket. You know, the ones in this thread complaining about the keyboard (because they never use an external keyboard) and won't buy anything else anyway (because they love the trackpad and never use an external mouse). For those people, USB-C is a major regression from MagSafe because even if Apple provided a USB-C dock in the box for free, for them it would be collecting dust in the bottom of a closet somewhere.
But this is typical for Apple, whose corporate ethos seems to consider the notion that allowing the customer to have a choice is a bad thing. Which means that the question isn't whether USB-C is a regression over MagSafe or not, it's whether you belong to Apple's core market segment and fit into Apple's core product strategy, which holds that the word "regression" is simply not part of the vocabulary used in the conversation revolving around Apple's products. Improvements are all doubleplusgood changes, simple as that.