Hi @mrbeama,
Thank you for using WP Maintenance Mode plugin and for sharing your feedback with us.
I’m sorry that recent changes don’t look helpful for your use cases.
We have made changes in the recent version of the plugin to make the user experience better and give more flexibility in customizing the maintenance page, as you can now use Gutenberg editor or a page builder to easily customize the page and select a pre-created design or create your new custom one.
The extra plugin (Otter) is only needed if users want to use any of the pre-designed templates that are created with the help of this plugin. In case you do not want to use the pre-design templates, you can remove the plugin and continue using WP Maintenance plugin without it.
The last thing is that if you already had the WP Maintenance Mode plugin installed before, you can opt-out of this change after the update of the plugin and keep everything as it was before (You see Migrate button that could be clicked to switch to the new version and you also have a Rollback button after in case you want to switch back).
Let me know if you have any other questions.
