Quite the contrary, as someone who has spent a lot of time doing and testing GUIs in complex applications, the things he talked about was very relatable from a

Quite the contrary, as someone who has spent a lot of time doing and testing GUIs in complex applications, the things he talked about was very relatable from a GUI design perspective. People who are poor at GUI design do exactly the same sort of things as has been done with the McMansions. When you do usability tests and people don't like a GUI, they often don't know why. But if you know design principles you can tell almost right away why they don't like it. It is because common design principles have been broken. Like with a house, a magazine page or a GUI design should have visual balance e.g. Your complaints really show that you didn't fully comprehend the problems and their potential solutions. The solution to the off-shoot sticking out isn't necessarily cutting it off. You could have achieved balance in multiple ways: Cut it off, expand the central mass, reduce secondary masses, simplify overall design. A big box of a house would have had better balance and more space. You could have solved the problem with excessive amounts of voids by simply having larger windows and simpler design. That would have had the opposite effect and given you more light, not less.