This is my gut feeling too. Every time one of these awful minimal flat interfaces pops up I know I'm going to spend ages trying to find where they've hidden all the functionality just to keep the UI 'clean'.

It's weirdly nostalgic, like playing the original "Wolfenstein 3D": there were effectively no visual cues for which wall panels were secret doorways so to find all of the goodies I ran along the edges of rooms pressing each panel in turn, endlessly hearing the flat farting tone that confirmed that yet another one did nothing useful.

Note to UI designers: nostalgia doesn't necessarily mean "good". I can be nostalgic for my grandmother's cabbage soup, doesn't mean I want a daily banquet of the stuff.

In particular, Microsoft has been pushing a "modern" UI which has been a disaster. That is, UWP apps, Windows store, etc. Inevitably if there is a UWP app and a real Windows application, the real one is head and shoulders better.

You think Microsoft would have learned that "modern" has the stench of death.

This peaked in Win8, but it's been a lot more fuzzy since then. Desktop Win32 apps can use UWP APIS, and can be distributed via the Store (complete with updates etc), for example.

Interestingly, I think this is the opposite in the Mac ecosystem. If an app uses the latest APIs and design trends, I expect it to be well crafted and cared for and am also rarely wrong.

I agree. I feel like the developers in the Mac ecosystem actually love developing apps for it and it shows.

In the Mac ecosystem, if the app isn't using the latest APIs, it's likely to be broken within the next 2-3 major macOS updates.

I assume it's going to ignore the system-wide autocorrect settings, and lack any option to disable spellcheck, which is one more reason to use the web version. With Teams I just rename "node-spellchkr.OFF" each time it updates.

I feel the same whenever I use a java type app. You know that java "sheen" that just coats the app. I've also been rarely wrong.

Yup. I see the three pane layout, I forget and move on. I don't need a layout for an ipad on a desktop device. A drunk can click a line of text with a mouse. Give me a compressed, information-dense list view without triple spaced lines. Give me options rather than strip features. Let me make my own decisions for how this tool should work for my purposes.

Modern (to me) means immature, unstable, untested and over-hyped without justification. Maybe there's an acronym in there somewhere...

IUUUOHJ really rolls of the tongue. Its the sound of the groan I make when encountering these tools.

Of course, but that is just because most programs are awful.

Exact opposite here: if it's a bunch of grey boxes with unnecessary decoration, I feel the program is likely to be badly maintained.