It's a little surprising that these UI choices are not a matter of user choice. Although when you think of the complexity of making a truly skinnable UI, or a component framework (I'm thinking Swing and the pluggable look and feel, or PLAF) Swing that IntelliJ used to be nominally written in. In that universe you could have made your own PLAF and rendered IntelliJ in that PLAF without asking permission.
It turns out, though, there is a lot of value in homogenizing your application skin. Users can recognize each other's applications, and help each other out. Whole categories of problems are avoided, like poorly written custom components that aren't PLAF compatible. I don't have the answer, but I find it interesting to consider the forces pushing for and against putting greater UI control in user hands.
> It turns out, though, there is a lot of value in homogenizing your application skin.
This is pretty well documented in the UX world, it’s called Jacob’s Law[1] and it states that your users spend most of their time using other products, and they generally prefer yours to work like others they’ve already trained themselves to use.
I get that change always comes with resistance, but I will never understand the knee jerk reaction of “they’re morons and they have no idea what they’re doing” that is so common with change.
> I get that change always comes with resistance, but I will never understand the knee jerk reaction of “they’re morons and they have no idea what they’re doing” that is so common with change.
What's there to understand? In most cases they are morons that don't know what they're doing (and are not doing the change to improve users' lives, but to drive internal promotions for product people).
It turns out, though, there is a lot of value in homogenizing your application skin. Users can recognize each other's applications, and help each other out. Whole categories of problems are avoided, like poorly written custom components that aren't PLAF compatible. I don't have the answer, but I find it interesting to consider the forces pushing for and against putting greater UI control in user hands.