Sony's new flash hotshoe design WORST design I have ever seen in a flash

Time for a reality check...

1. Was the Minolta/Sony iISO shoe a perfect design as it was?

No. It was okay, but it was probably better back when Minolta was in charge. After Sony took over, complaints began to surface about wobbling of flashes and performance failures due to poor fit in the camera shoes. Also, being completely plastic, the camera shoes and/or flash feet are easily subject to breakage.

2. What about compatibility?

Under Minolta, the iISO shoe was used only on still cameras, which was Minolta's core business, and the shoe supported nothing but flash units. Sony is a multi-product multi-business company. Sony also sells camcorders and mirrorless cameras and a huge assortment of accessories to put on them. Many of Sony's long-established products have an ISO shoe instead, which supports flash units but also more things such as microphones and video lights and monitors. Sony would need to (and actually started to) maintain two lines of duplicate products in order to serve the needs of all their cameras. For example, they offered a microphone with the iISO shoe in addition to the same microphone with the ISO shoe. This kind of arrangement is not efficient. Sony management decided that one of those shoes would have to go, and they chose to drop the iISO shoe. This has nothing to do with so-called whining A-mount camera owners who didn't like having to adapt their iISO connectors in order to use third-party radio triggers. Sony obviously would not care about any of that. If they cared about radio triggers they would be making their own. They made the change to the flash shoe for their own bottom line reasons.

3. What about those pins on the front?

The new shoe design incorporates a large number of electrical connectors, and Sony is obviously planning to use that interface for many new capabilities. The iISO shoe could not have been adapted in a forwardly compatible way to support that many connectors.

Those who think the pins are vulnerable to damage are jumping the gun. As has been said, they are stronger than they seem at first glance. They might in fact be vulnerable, but that remains to be seen after users have had time to bang on them for awhile. But until such time, that supposed vulnerability is unproven.