It feels like the OS vendors pulled the rug out from under us. There used to be reliable well-researched style guides. They moved slowly, to the point where t

It feels like the OS vendors pulled the rug out from under us. There used to be reliable well-researched style guides. They moved slowly, to the point where the pack-in software from Windows 1.0 looks pretty much sane in Windows 2000, or 1984 Mac software on OS 9 looks reasonable. At some point, they decided to toss all that out the window for aesthetics and shininess. I feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides, because they'd need to make sure it still looks and works fine when the user is running a theme that makes everything look like a particularly ugly Enlightenment theme.