As someone who's also sat on both sides of the fence, as a coder and a designer, I think there's a fair bit of truth in what the OP is saying. I can think of a

As someone who's also sat on both sides of the fence, as a coder and a designer, I think there's a fair bit of truth in what the OP is saying. I can think of a number of times where I've restrained my UI ambitions in order to keep code elegant, and also a number of times where I've been presented with a UI, and been forced to implement it. The latter case has always produced better designs, despite my whinging at the time ("Holy fuck, does this Photoshop-jockey even realise there's a difference between print and web design?" etc), because it forces me to produce code to make the UI, rather than leading me to a compromise between the code and the design.