I was a bit of that mindset until I worked close to a team that worked on such a redesign for a consumer product with hundreds of millions of users. The really

I was a bit of that mindset until I worked close to a team that worked on such a redesign for a consumer product with hundreds of millions of users. The really amazing thing to me was that even though the redesign didn't add any new functionality, and there weren't really any glaring usability problems with the previous one, users would still blog about some cool "new feature of the redesign" that had in fact been in product for years. Basically, changing the skin of the product caused users to poke about and try new things. Now the flip side of this is the design upset their routines, and there was certainly an element of that, but it was managed ok by giving people the option to switch back to the old design for a while. On the whole, the redesign caused increased feature awareness and usage, which definitely wouldn't have been my guess going in.