The target market is "power users" who want maximum functionality and don't care much about prettiness. I used to work on some of the code behind those "clunky

The target market is "power users" who want maximum functionality and don't care much about prettiness. I used to work on some of the code behind those "clunky" screens. I would say that Bloomberg UIs generally do quite a good job of making the functionality scale - you can do basic stuff quickly with sensible defaults, but when you need more sophistication the UI lets you dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper.