Yet another political decision done in the name of "improving the brand" and "consistency" at the expense of usability.

Several parts of MSDN have already been steadily getting destroyed by this design trend (eg forum list that has no delimitation whatsoever, a total mess). It's too bad this is going away as well; will have to rely on local doc & a viewer to get a proper treeview back.

Cathy Sullivan,

It has been explained a countless times why that theme editor is extremely far from covering every wrongdoing in this GUI; off the top of my head, I can think of: icon colors; delimitations between toolbars; chrome of the main window that doesn't respect the Windows theme, making it impossible to distinguish which VS window is active. And so on and so forth; the various other bugs in which the theme editor has been suggested and rightfully rejected host a ton of comments far better expressed than mine.

However, that is not the issue here. The point of this feedback item is not specifically the GUI changes (many other items handle them) but the people and dubious motivations behind them.

What is especially hard to swallow in this ordeal is that everyone kept telling you how wrong you were in every single beta, but you just kept pushing the changes universally disliked. I have never seen such an amount of negative comments about a particular topic in VS-related blogs.

On top of that, none of it makes any sense from a usability point of view, which is what developers care about. These changes are political, aimed at improving some sort of brand; but they utterly disregard usability, pleasure of use, beauty, OS integration.

Brian Harry has written thorough explanations about the GUI on page 3 of the comments @
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/09/12/visual-studio-update-this-fall.aspx?CommentPosted=true&PageIndex=3>.

Doug Turnure,

How could you be ******** enough not to realize that by "theme", people are not talking only about colors but also about icons, borders, spacing, the chrome, etc?