Stupid Web 2.0

Netflix's new Ajaxed out interface is driving me nuts. It slows down the whole process and doesn't seem intuitive to me at all. I had this flow to using their website, queue... read... rate... go back... rate... read... queue. Now I practically can't use it. I click on a rating and expect to go to the next thing and I get this stupid window that pops up over everything. I probably have no right to complain since I personally despise web development but it really seems that designers are designing sites more about what they'd like the users to do instead of actually adding badly needed functionality.
This is a prime example of poorly thought out flow and its persisted across a couple of designs: I go through my recommended movies and start rating to get better recommendations and to show off what I've though about stuff. Often Netflix will recommend many movies I've already seen so this seems like a good way of cruising through all those and documenting them. Sometimes I'll queue up a movie I want to see while I'm at it but instead of returning me to the page I was just reading it used to take me to a new page with "Other people who rented this..." kind of crap. I'd just hit the back button a couple times and wind up where I started, not efficient but not crippling. Now I have to actually locate a stupid little [x] on the screen to get these recommendations to go away. They seem so intent on showing these to me I wonder if there is a financial incentive.