There are times and places where I want to see a lot of humanity and imperfection in transactions, and there are times I don't. You're dunking using McDonalds as an example, but there's a reason they all look like that, and it's one of the most successful businesses in the world.

If you're building the application equivalent of JP Graziano or La Chaparrita Taqueria, make it human, scuffed up even. I'd like JP Graziano less if it looked like a Cheesecake Factory. Right there with you. But if you're building a tool, for developers, one that will mostly be used to conduct some kind of business? Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.

> Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.

but even that doesn't really hold any more. The great slopification has made it so that people don't even associate that kind of thing with reliability. Instead it's gotten a kind of ca the year 2000 "thing out of a Chinese factory" vibe to it. Even on practical grounds you might as well give it your own shot now because that stuff is poisoned.

As a concrete example, if you wanted to make a Github competitor ten years ago you tried to look like Github, now you're better off trying to look like sourcehut or codeberg because you don't look like the thing that dies every five minutes.