People are going to misuse any design guideline -- that doesn't say anything about the guidelines themselves. Plain, simple layouts lend themselves to abuse jus

People are going to misuse any design guideline -- that doesn't say anything about the guidelines themselves. Plain, simple layouts lend themselves to abuse just like textures, shadows and chunky buttons. The results are equally silly -- your average super-flat, plain, simple layout with flat, simple icons is as annoying to interact with as the tackiest Winamp skin you can remember. Skeumomorphism has become this mythical beast that supposedly meant every interface was hard to use, cluttered and unintuitive. But we actually had a lot of very good, very useful interfaces back when it was a thing. In fact most programs written after GUIs became common enough had pretty good interfaces. Outrageous skins and things like Kai Power Tools were exceptions, not the norm.