If I’m seeing things correctly Android 9 did away with priority notifications and it seems like that’s a huge step backward.
Priority notifications allowed you to tell your phone that while you didn’t want to turn off all notifications you just wanted ones that were important to you for a while. I think if you were to ask people they would love to have this capability. However in Android 9 it looks like this middle ground between all notifications and full-on do-not-disturb mode was eliminated. If I’m wrong about this I hope someone will let me know. My investigations so far have led me to believe that Google decided this feature was a waste of time for some reason. I’m hoping that they choose to reimplement this obviously useful feature.