It was tried. Many, many people spent many, many hours inside of Apple trying to make the Touchbar more useful. The simple fact was that looking down at it was

It was tried. Many, many people spent many, many hours inside of Apple trying to make the Touchbar more useful. The simple fact was that looking down at it was a context shift and, in general, no one wanted to do it. It exposed functionality that you would eventually learn to drive from the keyboard.