I suspect there's a belief in some mythic market of "computer-averse" people, who if we just round off enough rough corners-- both metaphorically and literally-

I suspect there's a belief in some mythic market of "computer-averse" people, who if we just round off enough rough corners-- both metaphorically and literally-- they'll be willing to jump from, say, an iDevice or Chromebook, or no computer at all, to a full Windows PC. What saddens me is that this steers the whole design process. You create a thin candy coating over the system to appeal to this audience, but at the same time, that clogs up established workflows and creates an inconsistent mess for more experienced users who have to work with both new and old UX flows. Maybe we need to simply own the inconsistency. Build the shiny new experiences as a seperate flow, and allow users to migrate towards more traditional, powerful tools with the old UI conventions. Something like the manufacturer-provided shell you'd see on a late Windows 3.1 PC, where eventually you outgrow it and switch to using Program Manager.