Criticism of GUI design trends like this is always attacked for being out of touch -- "you just want everything to cater to your weird taste", "most of the user

Criticism of GUI design trends like this is always attacked for being out of touch -- "you just want everything to cater to your weird taste", "most of the users aren't experts", "iOS enabled my papa to send emails, he never even worked out how to turn on the Macintosh II SE", and so on -- this comes from a well-intentioned place but doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. The problems described here are problems for less-experienced/non-technical/casual users, too. In fact, it seems reasonable to assume that friction arising from the design of the UI will have a greater impact on non-expert users. Highly proficient and experienced users are able to work around problems more easily, recognise the (changed) patterns more easily, etc. They are also more able to articulate what the problems are and are more likely to dedicate time to doing so. When your non-technical family member faces some inscrutable change to their workflow, they seek your help to get their task done, not to analyse the design or intent behind the UI -- and you know that, so you use your expertise to adapt their workflow to the new design and they thank you for it. When your professional family member faces some inscrutable change to their workflow, they tell you how shit software is these days and find a solution on their own. So on one hand you hear "help me get my thing done" and on the other you hear "software used to be better". It's not surprising that people treat the cases differently -- even though both are problems stemming from UI design decisions. editendum: I guess it's worth pointing out explicitly that usability is not universal. Some software is complicated because it's for doing complicated work.