Swipe between screens is locked, only the dots work. WHY?

I powered off and then on again, and now I can swipe page to page normally. I've been lost without the home button and swiping madly around trying to get things to work "intuitively". Eventually I actually had to read the manual. There is nothing there about locking out the swipe left/right to navigate page to page. But one of my mad gestures must have triggered that feature, and cycling power fixed it. It just seems like this new iPhone is worse than the old model 6 I had. But Steve Jobs was still around for the 6, and nobody at Apple is the quality tyrant like Steve used to be. I miss him.