> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.

90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor, you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the appropriate skillset.

The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends was that they were objectively superior.

I agree, only the very best designs (and their designers) can nicely mix utility and beauty (or the wow factor, it’s hard to define).

And people sometimes overestimate their designs because beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful in the eyes of their parent.

Also, there’s a reason why the mass adopted plastic, monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is studied as a cornerstone of design.