Best I can tell, it's a trend because it's a trend. It'll live out it's lifetime exactly like any other fashion or trend cycle. The origins are murky or lost to

Best I can tell, it's a trend because it's a trend. It'll live out it's lifetime exactly like any other fashion or trend cycle. The origins are murky or lost to history. It'll run it's course for a couple of years and will change to something else. High contrast will suddenly be cool again. The self-aware among the designers and creators will shrug and follow the next trend with a resigned attitude. The less self-aware ones will teach themselves to see the beauty in the new system. There will be long, impassioned blog posts about why low-contrast was wrong - all wrong. It was all done before the person writing the blog post had been out of college so of course s/he was not responsible for any of it... and so goes the circle of life.