For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
The root cause is that UX folks almost never use a product as often as their users.
So what's an "oh, left instead of right" minor change for them is anathema to someone with muscle memory.
Ergo, IMHO, all breaking UX changes should be required to clear a high bar, with the default being status quo + tweaks.
- We now have a plethora of UX logging and can see real time where users struggle.
- There are dedicated UX teams whose sole focus is to improve UX.
- More people are using technology than ever, and so we have a more representative sample of data to work with.
- Mimicking mobile UIs, as eloquently called out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290812
- I suspect there is something of a race to the bottom WRT To UX teams; they're always designing around any pain point, which has a few knock-on effects:
- There will _always_ be pain points, and so there will _always_ need to be UI changes.
- Designing a product so that the bottom of the bell curve can use it well probably does make an objectively worse product.
- There's nothing wrong with needing to learn a UI, and this "learning" could be mistaken as pain point.
- UX teams can't exist if there aren't things to constantly change, which increases the UI churn.
They don't work like the UX teams of yesteryear.
In the early 2000s, companies did user studies. Put a potential user in front of the product, let them use it while the UX team observed. Ask questions to the user afterwards. Make changes, repeat.
But that kind of research is expensive, so it's thrown out to instead just collect tons of metrics that likely don't tell a whole story. They think "Users must love feature X because they keep clicking on it!" when the reality is that they're trying to find something else, but the label for X looks related to what they want.
I agree with all your points regarding the race to the bottom. I think that's why UIs hide so much information. Older interface designs are considered "confusing" or "cluttered" because there's so much there at a first glance, even if all the buttons elements are grouped by functionality.