A quote from you "'I've been using Duck duck go now for more than 4 years and have never had a problem". How is that possible that you never had problems, four years ago, Duckduckgo never had their mapping service and other features such as images. In the past Duckduckgo was not a completely built search engine, now finally these features have been implemented and now I would not have a problem using it, the search engine is so much better than in the past.
True, we have improved, but there was a lot of things to like about old DDG. For one, we had some more IAs than we do now (we had a redesign in May 2014, and some of the IAs still haven't been adapted for the new syntax and look).