I feel the same way. Earlier this week I read a wonderful article from Bruce Tognazzini, who worked at Apple from 1978 to 1992 and was instrumental in designin

I feel the same way. Earlier this week I read a wonderful article from Bruce Tognazzini, who worked at Apple from 1978 to 1992 and was instrumental in designing the usability guidelines for the Apple II and the classic Mac OS, called "The Third User" (https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/), where he makes the claim that Apple's UI approach for iOS heavily focuses on buyers at the expense of users. I personally believe that this trend is commonplace throughout personal computing and on the Web these days. UI has now been tied into notions of brand identity, with some developers going as far as to demand that operating system environments respect their design choices rather than enforce system-wide conventions (see the "Please don't theme our apps" petition from some GNOME developers: https://stopthemingmy.app https://stopthemingmy.app). There's been a shift away from the utilitarian UI designs from the 1990s (such as the classic Mac OS and Windows 95) to designs with a lot of visual appeal (such as Mac OS X's Aqua and its iterations over the past two decades, Windows Vista's Aero, Windows 10's flat design, Google's Material Design, and iOS). Unfortunately, there's a tendency for some of these visually-appealing designs to not work well for users in practice, especially for power users. I agree with you: the solution should be to allow users to not only theme their UIs, but to even modify them as they see fit. Consider GIMP for example. While some people like it's interface, other people complain that it's un-intuitive and not like Photoshop. Well, what if GIMP's functionality was separated from its interface, and there were two modifiable files that GIMP use: one that describes the UI elements (kind of like HTML: e.g., buttons, views, menu items), and another one that describes how those UI elements are displayed (kind of like CSS). Imagine if users could modify these HTML and CSS files to create different GIMP interfaces based on their liking. Imagine if the GIMP user community shared UI configuration files amongst each other. Users will have a lot more flexibility regarding how they want to use their software tools. This will also be a tremendous boon for people with accessibility needs. This is not just talk; I'm actually currently in the design phase of a side project where I'm building such a UI toolkit for the X Window System in Common Lisp as part of a larger goal that I have of building a OpenDoc-style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E) component-based desktop that leverages the powerful Common Lisp Object System. The UI toolkit that I'm planning to build will define UIs using three S-expression configuration files: a content definition file, a style definition file, and a localization file.