I agree and I wish I had insight into what exactly is going on inside Google. A couple of hypotheses: 1. Someone (or a group of people) within mistakenly belie

I agree and I wish I had insight into what exactly is going on inside Google. A couple of hypotheses: 1. Someone (or a group of people) within mistakenly believes this design aesthetic[1] is good and have gained a lot of political power. I guess they like things that look pretty in screenshots instead of things that are actually useful or intuitive? 2. They're heavily optimizing for some metric (engagement, user growth, whatever) that is orthogonal to (or has a small component along) the usability vector. [1] Simplistic defaults, not easily configurable, flat, tons of whitespace, etc...