> I think there's another big part of this, and that's that working on the design is going to open you up to bikeshedding from all the non-designers whose work you're supplanting.

Or maybe sometimes it isn't bikeshedding but legitimate concerns from longtime users, supporters or even creators of said software.

> Can you imagine how galling it would be for the designers or marketing team to start sitting in on code reviews? What do they know? But here in this forum, lots of people are dumping on the ribbon interface (which is quite popular, works very well, etc). Who's going to volunteer for that?

I'd readily admit to be one of those "dumping" at the ribbon interface as long as you believe me that it is a bit tongue-in-cheek since I'm very open about my colour weakness and lack of education in design. :-)

That said a number of the things that are said about the ribbon thing is IMO legitimate and well argued issues like the use of valuable vertical space and the lack of discoverability. (This is a general problem today as browser etc hide menus so you have to press alt to see them, thereby discriminating against non-power-users. Same goes for removing the context-menu-button on the keyboard completely hiding the feature: who thinks of just trying shift-F10 if they don't know what they are missing and google it?)

Edit: Remove stray sentence at end. Try even harder not to come off as arrogant