What's old is new again. It's not a generational thing, it's a market maturity thing. There were plenty of unique UI's in the 80's (every OS with a GUI had a

What's old is new again. It's not a generational thing, it's a market maturity thing. There were plenty of unique UI's in the 80's (every OS with a GUI had a distinct look and feel) and 90's (most OS GUIs had started to look and feel like Windows but a few daring applications took a chance to be different). Kai's Power Tools[1] was my favorite as it had a distinctive look and feel but was entirely functional. There were a number Mac apps with carefully crafted and unique UI's in the pre-iOS days which no doubt took a ton of effort vs. just making a bland Windows-esque UI. It's not so much that developers stop wanting to push the envelope, it's that beyond being an early stage differentiation gimmick, users don't tend to reward them for very long for the effort. So developers focus on what they do get rewarded for which tend to be the checkbox features vs. their competition and the UI is demoted to whatever the lowest-effort fashion of the day is. Even Apple seems to have settled on slapping on a fresh coat of paint every few years and calling it a day. [1] https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/kais-power-tools-30 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/kais-power-tools-30