I'm not particularly bothered by non-developer UI. I'm bothered by the incessant application of mobile UI idioms to desktop programs (remember when all windows programs looked somewhat similar?), by UI churn with no purpose, by software that puts functionality five clicks deep for no reason other than to keep the ui 'minimal', by the use of unclear icons when there's room for text (worse, when it's one of the bare handful of things with a universally-understood icon and they decided to invent their own), by UIs that just plain don't present important information for fear of making things 'busy'. There's a lot to get mad about when it comes to modern UIs without needing to approach it from a software developer usage style perspective.
You're making a lot of assumptions about who's doing what, what problems they're trying to solve by doing it, and why. The discipline of UI design is figuring out how people can solve their problems easily and effectively. If you have advanced users that need to make five mouse clicks to perform an essential function, that's a bad design and the chance of that being a UI design decision is just about zero. Same thing with icons. UI design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication: do you think it's more likely a UI designer-- a professional and likely educated interactivity communicator-- chose those icons, or a developer or project manager grabbing a sexy looking UI mockup on dribble and trying to smash their use case into it?
Minimalism isn't a goal-- it's a tool to make a better interface and can easily be overused. The people that think minimalism is a goal and will chop out essential features to make something "look designed" are almost always developers. Same thing with unclear icons. As someone with a design degree that's done UI design but worked as a back-end developer for a decade before that, and worked as a UNIX admin off and on for a decade before that, I am very familiar with the technical perspective on design and it's various echo-chamber-reinforced follies.
It's not like all UI designers are incredibly qualified or don't underestimate the importance of some particular function within some subset of users, and some people that hire designers don't realize that a graphic designer isn't a UI designer and shouldn't be expected to work as one. But 700 times out of 1000, that's something dev said "this is too annoying to implement" or some project manager dropped it from the timeline. Maybe 250 of those remaining times, the project manager says "we don't need designers for this next set of features, right? Dev can just make it look like the other parts of the project?"
Developers read an edward tufte book, think they're experts, and come up with all sorts of folk explanations about what's happening with a design and why people are doing it, then talk about it in venues like this with a million other developers agreeing with them. That does a whole lot more damage to UIs in the wild than bad design decisions made by designers.
You seem to think I'm attacking UI designers. I'm not. I think software would be a lot better with professional UI designers designing UIs.
edit: I am making a lot of assumptions. I'm assuming that most UIs aren't really designed, or are 'designed' from above with directions that are primarily concerned about aesthetics.
+1 to all this. And when did it become cool to have icons that provide no feedback they've been clicked, combined with no loading state? I'm always clicking stuff twice now because I'm not sure I even clicked it the first time.
