Yes, good design is more than visual aesthetics. But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false. If it looks

Yes, good design is more than visual aesthetics. But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false. If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Period. At best, top-notch effort in other areas can drag it up to the same approximate level as pristine-looking-but-utterly-unusable designs, which are still terrible. His position would only be contradictory if he somehow claimed that something was a good design based solely on a screenshot.