It’s not a step backwards because it’s an additive feature; you’ve lost no utility after tags than before. In fact you now have a valuable option to use hashtags or not. Meanwhile, Spending Analytics remain the default way of tracking ones finances & even this is undergoing a redesign.
Naturally, I expect Monzo will improve this tag feature over time but it’s difficult for them to manage lofty expectations when you apply cross-industry comparisons.
P.S. SpaceX to the Mars 
In a way, this makes sense but on the other hand it can work against Monzo. Tom Broomfield has remarked that while feedback from Community users is invaluable to Monzo, they must be mindful that we may not be representative of the whole user base. It’s a double-edged sword.
Also, if Monzo were to take an Amazonian or Apple stance, they may well believe that customers do not know what they want/need until you show them. There’s a balance between customer driven demand and businesses creating demand.
I think apple’s share price is reflecting how that can backfire
Emphasis mine.
They’re not, we’re power users & much more demanding + willing to deal with more complexity than the average user.
That’s a Huge assumption 
if you’d bothered to quote the whole paragraph I say exactly this
“In fact I suspect we are more likely to put up with unfinished features and prepared to work harder at using the app.”
you do have a habit of editing your posts to make subsequent posts look incorrect
No I just don’t like being accused of taking comments out of context. So I did you the courtesy of adding the full quote.
Clearly this -
is not what I said -
I didn’t say it was a step backwards, just that it feels like a step backwards, particularly when so many users on the forum have stated an interest in custom categories.
I’m in no way criticising Monzo… I see them as a leader in this space. But if competing apps offer functionality that they are not willing to, then people may be inclined to look elsewhere.
The consumer apps don’t, which reinforces the idea that Monzo are doing this for a good reason.
Not at the moment. I can see some argument for keeping things simple. It may be a bit like pots, where the majority of users only have 1 or 2 set up, and so Monzo believe there’s limited use case for custom categories.
There is certainly demand for some level of custom tracking however. I’m hoping Monzo will develop an alternative, but tags, in it’s current state, is by no means that. Not to say that the functionality can’t be inproved…
It does seem to me that Monzo are taking our feedback less seriously.
We ask for custom categories, get rebuked as its not something Monzo wanted to do, we then keep going on about it and then get an alternative which we didn’t really want/need if our original request for custom categories had been addressed.
I think the lack of responses by Monzo staff to some of the criticisms off tags which has been posted here is telling
I have to agree. I went back through a few of my old transactions and started adding tags. It’s tedious to have to type out a manual tag every time a transaction comes in, so I’ve stopped doing it. I know Monzo can give you recommendations that you can quickly add, but I want all my tags with capital letters (for example #Football) so that would never work for me! 
You might be overthinking it. We’ve seen the team engage a lot more in collecting feedback, with dedicated topics, crowdsourcing ideas & quickly developing feature like Coin Jar because that functionality was in demand.
I think it means they haven’t decided their plans for the functionality yet, having only just launched the feature & not yet had time to see how it’s used.
Edits - to add links.
Yes possibly, although I was referring to their engagment on custom categories which seems to always be dismissive as they’ve mentioned in the past they don’t want to do it.
Yes this could be true but why not just come out and say that? Rather than say nothing or very little to the feedback we have given them?
I agree, I’d have liked to have seen that sort of engagement too. And for what it’s worth, I did ask.
We are certainly reading the criticisms! Many of us do read the community forum, even if not too many find time to post that often. I don’t have much involvement in these kinds of app-side features but the reaction to them are interesting to read. 
The community forum is one of the many places we receive feedback. Even here, we get a lot of it with often conflicting views. While we can’t always respond to everything like we did in the early days anymore, we do read as much as we can and take points back to work on for the next iteration.
That’s not to say that community feedback isn’t being directly taken onboard. My role at Monzo is now generally fixing issues reported through either support or the community (for example, fixing Monzo.me avatars and the User #0 issue) and a feature that I’ve just started experimenting with on the side was inspired by a thread here. 
I always assumed some staff were reading them and its good to get a response that the feedback is being taken on board, although how long would it have taken for a Monzo member of staff to say “We are taking all of this on board for our next round of improvements” or something similar? I get that staff are a lot more busy than when Monzo first launched but really that would have taken 2 minutes max to write? Just my opinion though
I’ve been attempting to make use of the # feature mostly in anticipation of more breakdown options.
I really need a way to tag multiple transactions at once though, tagging each one individually will take a long time and I don’t have the patience or time for it.
It would be helpful if I could search my feed, select the transactions I want and tag them all with a chosen # tag.
If they auto completed at the same time that would also help.
Just my two cents 
Additionally pretty much everything is fed back to the teams who can do something about it.
I’m not informed enough to answer engineering priorities, the information is there to find if I want to, we get snapshots of where teams are weekly.
I often post links in slack re any feedback whether it’s product or community or anything else. It’s usually product. This is a busy busy channel for suggestions. We know they get read and taken on board, but these are the people designing and implementing.
All of that to say, we aren’t ignoring you, and your feedback is considered.
As an aside, most of my posts are outside my working hours … 
This seems a little trite and too easy to do without offering proper info. I often pass on feedback elsewhere and get promised “we’re looking into it/ we’re taking it on board” but it never actually gets done. I really appreciate whenever a staff member crafts a comprehensive response re: a feature requested or a question or offer a post-mortem about a problem faced.
There are lots of suggestions floating about, if everyone got told “we will take this on board” it would be a lot of empty promises and responses cluttering up the forum imo.