While I agree to some extent about branding and colours, things were hardly a panacea with a lot of buttons and checkboxes as the infamous "Bulk Rename Utility" showed how things could get out of control (probably nice for the author and those that used it from the start but waay too cluttered for anyone without exp).

First and foremost an UI shouldn't confuse or even worse mislead the user, now button as hammer for everything chaoses of old or branding idiocy of today both are guilty of those crimes.

The art of UI's has progressed, sadly some fresh designers are dogmatic as they are mostly exposed to "beautiful" B2C products rather that internal products and often miss the effectiveness factor of tools.

https://medium.com/@aneel.kaushikk/bulk-rename-utility-redes...

> things were hardly a panacea with a lot of buttons and checkboxes as the infamous "Bulk Rename Utility" showed how things could get out of control

Layout and usability are independent of widget design. I'll take the widgets shown in the "Bulk Rename Facility" over the any of the flat UI "material" nonsense where it's not clear what is clickable and you cannot by process of elimination explore the UI.

That said, usability definitely has been improved over the years. So no, not everything was better then, but the widgets were.

I've never heard of, or seen the tool, and I'm not particularly steeped in legacy software.

So I immediately got why this could be an example of "out of control UI/UX"... but immediately my eye was drawn to the bolded headings at the top of each section, and then the numbers next to them.

And so pretty much immediately after that it was clear how this worked: select the files I want to rename, checkboxes to select the transformations I want, and press the big Rename button when I'm ready.

Their redesign feels worse. Hiding the details of each transformation feels well intentioned, but it'd get very annoying having to open and close sections: never getting a full picture of the pipeline I'm putting together.

It also hides features I wouldn't expect to exist, like the Js renaming and translation.

I think if we hadn't let UI become implicit marketing and kept it highly HCI-driven we could have had the best of both worlds. But I guess the software industry decided we need new product releases to look different enough to warrant collecting more money, so we're deep down the current path.