Is there a way to restore the brush panel to the old version where all the brushes are in a grid rather than in the annoying "groups"? I've been searching for hours on blogs, forums, and videos trying to find out how to do it. I've seen a few moderators from the community forums here say there is a way, but none of them actually said how to do it or provided a useful link to the answer. So, how do I go back to the old panel? Am I just S-O-L?
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Have you tried playing with the display options? Right click inside the document window and click on the gear icon. Turning everything by Brush Tip off gets you close. As c.p. has told you, you can drag the presets out of the folders and delete the folders.
I came to some realizations, and shared some thoughts a few days ago in this thread. Like all radical changes, it can take some work to learn them, but they are usually seen as improvements in the end. Heck, I am even starting to like Select & Mask nowadays.
I did see the feature video from Julieanne Kost about being able to drag brushes out of groups and such, but that unfortunately doesn't solve my problem considering I use so many brushes in my works that doing that would create an endless list that I would constantly be clearing and loading. I currently have 86 brush sets, each with roughly a dozen or so brushes so that would get pretty cluttered pretty quickly. 
I have played around with the view settings to get it close to what I had (show brush tip only, and expanding the panel size with large icons), but the groups are still not very easy to use on the fly. My major qualms being that the user has to have pinpoint accuracy to click on the tiny arrow to expand a group (easier to do with a mouse, but can put tablet users out when using their pen), rather than just being able to expand or collapse groups easily by clicking on the line itself. My other qualm is that organization has to be done manually rather than having having a function auto sort groups alphabetically. The thread of yours that you linked has some useful information that I can make use of, so I appreciate that.
By the looks of it I'll just have to grit and bear it and get used to the groups until Adobe decides to add that sort of automation functionality to the brush groups. As it stands I find the majority of the features in CC 2018 too useful to go back to the earlier version (especially the updates to the pen tool). I'm a very heavy brush user so it's possible I find this more inconvenient than most other users.
(Screenshot of Photoshop CS5.1 brush panel on my work computer)
Jopuma wrote
Am I correct in assuming that if I group my brushes in folders in the presets that Photoshop will place them in groups as well in the brush panel? Or will I still need to load sets individually and manually organize them?
Only so long as you don't delete the folder from the right click list. Photoshop will remember what is in that list via its Preferences (I think) so resetting Preferences might lose those changes. I'll test that when I get some time.
To be safe, open the Preset Manager, and save the modified folder/set. I have a feeling that will save it to Program Files. Yep, just checked and is the case. So if you use the App Data hierarchy, (or its Mac equivalent) copy the files across after you have organised your brushes
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2018\Presets\Brushes
I still have my CC2017 presets, and can copy from there, but I have reinstalled Windows since CC2015, so they do not show. FWIIW, I always save the entire App Data folder hierarchy to a different drive before reinstalling Windows.
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