I get the impression that "it looks good" has only fairly recently become an important design consideration for hackers. The problem is not specific to Emacs, q

I get the impression that "it looks good" has only fairly recently become an important design consideration for hackers. The problem is not specific to Emacs, quite a bit of Linux FOSS has a pretty ugly GUI. It's starting to get better, but fixing early design choices can be a lot of work. I guess nobody has bothered putting that much work into the Emacs GUI yet... Until then: use Emacs in terminal. That's the way it was meant to be used originally, and it still looks best that way ;-)