Like I said in an earlier comment, age has very little to do with this. "Hipsters" can pretty much be any age.
It's more the "hipster" mindset and attitude that's the problem. This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations. Maybe that's okay when it comes to something like clothing. It isn't acceptable, however, when it comes to tools that are supposed to be productive, including software.
If you've got a better term than "hipster", I'm willing to consider using it. I'm just not aware of any other term that better describes the particular attitude that puts vanity, arrogance, ego, smugness and focus on appearance over everything else.
How about instead of using a crappy word that attempts to tar a nebulous ill-defined group of people, you just point out the issues you have with it. No need for the "hipster" straw-man, as far as I'm concerned, and I agree with your points. "Hipster" is over-done, and from where I'm sitting those who use it pejoratively come across as elitist.
Like I said in the comment you replied to, if you have a better term, please mention it here.
I don't think that these people, or more specifically their attitude and their approach toward software UI design, are "nebulous" nor "ill-defined". It's extremely easy to identify incidents involving them: Windows 8, GNOME 3, Firefox 4 and later, this new version of Google Maps, and the Slashdot beta website, among others.
There are some common traits we see with these cases:
1. They hijack an existing, well-established software product.
2. They throw out years, if not decades, of accumulated knowledge and experience.
3. They usually come in with little to no relevant experience themselves.
4. They consider appearance far more important than usability, efficiency or productivity.
5. They create a design that's obviously flawed in many different ways.
6. They refuse to accept or even acknowledge these many flaws in their designs, no matter how loudly long-time users point them out.
7. They release their changes into the wild, often forcing them upon users who absolutely abhor the changes.
8. Their design efforts drive away more users than they could ever hope to bring in.
The fourth and sixth points are the key ones here. They are the very essence of the "hipster" attitude, regardless of whether we're talking about clothing, food, software UI design, or pretty much anything else they're involved with.
> This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations.
90% of the complaints I see about things being bad now because of "fashion and trends trumping all other considerations" seem to just be people applying who are themselves putting fashions and trends above all other considerations -- its just that they found a fashion or trend that they favored several years ago and are upset that the rest of the world doesn't still favor that fashion/trend.
And that's not entirely unreasonable -- or necessarily detached from personal productivity. Something that is a common trend in a field where productivity is relevant is almost certainly also useful to some subset of the market. Likewise, compatibility with expectations driven by trends external to the field can make new fashions also more productive to the mass market, even if they aren't more productive to the subset that the prior fashion "clicked" with well on a deeper level.
In this case, I think that I would define "hipster" as "thinks they are the second coming of Steve Jobs." They're basically cargo culting, they saw Steve Jobs stir shit up, so they think that if they stir shit up as well, the world will hail them as geniuses and shower them with riches. The problem is that they give little thought to exactly what they are stirring up, or how they are doing it. Inevitably they just make a hash of everything.
That and they're positively obsessed with JavaScript, Node.js, and a coding style that favors ample and unnecessary usage of anonymous JavaScript functions as nested parameters.
It's more the "hipster" mindset and attitude that's the problem. This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations. Maybe that's okay when it comes to something like clothing. It isn't acceptable, however, when it comes to tools that are supposed to be productive, including software.
If you've got a better term than "hipster", I'm willing to consider using it. I'm just not aware of any other term that better describes the particular attitude that puts vanity, arrogance, ego, smugness and focus on appearance over everything else.