"As a proponent of what is now called the old school of UI design" Doesn't sound like a very old school to me. vi, emacs and a large portion of popular command

"As a proponent of what is now called the old school of UI design" Doesn't sound like a very old school to me. vi, emacs and a large portion of popular command line tools came about in an era where devising one's own interface and interface conventions was the only route to actually providing an interface. Desktop environments ameliorated this somewhat, but only for common, generic tasks (copying, pasting, etc.). For any specialized or application-specific tasks it's always been roll-your-own, except that now people are actually thinking about the problem before creating the UI. Consistency is important, but it's not the only factor.