The work on reducing dark mode contrasts seems valid.. lots of dark mode is way too high contrast. It's trendy, so I try it, and pretty immediately can feel th

The work on reducing dark mode contrasts seems valid.. lots of dark mode is way too high contrast. It's trendy, so I try it, and pretty immediately can feel the contrast messing with my eyes. So it gets turned off. However I hate the ever increasing emphasis on design that doesn't even care about actual usability. It's all about the shapes and styling of elements and so much less on how all the components fit together, how the user moves through the application, etc.. I've been at this a while and used to be a UI guy, it feels like the balance of design:usability has shifted further towards design than at any other time since I've been using a computer. In places where there used to not be a "designer" flow and usability could end up being emphasized more than it is today. Today a designer sits there and restyles the widgets, in the past with no designer everyone else was happy to take the stock widgets and follow the design guidelines from MS or especially Apple. No thought on restyling widgets meant all the UI design time was on the usability. Thankfully the project I work on right now has a good balance. Prior to our current UI designer we had a design-first person and it was kind of a disaster, stuff was getting restyled while UI requests from customers to fix usability issues were left to wither and die.