I must be a philistine because with the primary example used on the landing page I actually prefer the bordered version. It seems clearer/cleaner to me. Maybe it's a vestige of growing up in the 90's writing Access applications on the side for dosh when I was a teenager?
I thought the same thing. As ugly as all those "WinForms"-esque 90s applications were, they presented dense amounts of information in a usable way, provided you had time to learn the application.
And the time it took was probably shorter, since you could just poke around menus full of text that says what the damn thing does, that might open modals or dialog boxes full of buttons that do what they say on the damn button, and icons that gasp, might have had text labels indicating what they do! You could hop in and if your task was reasonably simple, just hop the menus and click on stuff and see if it was what you needed.
But no, here's a smear of low contrast grey with some tiny, grey, unlabeled hieroglyphics for buttons/icons, isn't it nice? It's so clean! So pretty! So lacking in discoverability!
