I don't disagree that designers choose a less threatening aesthetics that incorporates familiarity. Pandering to the lowest common denominator eventually leads

I don't disagree that designers choose a less threatening aesthetics that incorporates familiarity. Pandering to the lowest common denominator eventually leads to the most familiar of features - GOOG is just a box and two buttons, for example. I would also argue that the Formerly-Known-As-MetroUI pattern is also rather utilitarian. It was designed to have a low information density, but highly relevant information - that is to say, show less, but show higher quality information. Too bad people have constantly misused those great ideas in patterns tho