Hi Shondarogers, I never used those links before because I always had everything in my bookmarks or just typed in the complete URL. I would guess most of the menu changes have been to the betterment of your average user without concern for us technorati.
Also removing yourself from being a manager of a Google+ page does not effect your access to Google Analytics or Webmaster tools. I still see all on my clients there. For those two specifically I always add my account as a user.
However I never added myself as a user for Places as that was not best practice and only recently noticed that it had a similar effect of when adding myself as a manager to Google+ page so I remove that access this weekend hoping it will help with some ranking issues we are having.
My client is in an extremely competitive market, real estate, in a very populaces area, Irvine, California. The last two month we have been beating all but 2 of the blended pack organically for their primary keyword but we are still 150ish (page 15) on the map search. Hopefully this will be the key to getting the map results up and getting them into the blended results.