I know what you mean, I get that skeuomorphic was overdone in a lot of places but, the remedy may have been worse than the disease since we have had such regression in UI design that it now looks somewhat like high-dpi versions of text user interface graphical blue blocks everywhere.
Honestly skeuomorphism was so much better than the flat mobileshit we're stuck with now.
We had Windows 7, gnome 2, OSX Lion, all of which had mild drop shadows, 3d depth in icons and window borders, clearly delineated edges between various UI controls, and then it was as if one day some shadow illuminati council of UI design put out a worldwide decree that everything has to be flat and use indecipherable heiroglyphic vector icons made of little dots and lines.
I've been waiting for some kind of aesthetic counter-reaction to take place and it seems like it actually might be starting to happen. 2010-era was the peak of UI design and it's high time we went back, godammit!
History goes in spiral. After everyone will be fed up with flat style, someone will release gorgeous super-realistic skeuomorphic UI and everyone will praise it.
Even worse actually. text user interfaces had contrasting backgrounds between different controls. It took me a while to learn the large-text-as-a-tab style in Metro UI.
It's not just the flatness that irritates me, there is such low information density, so much white space and large text sizes it feels like using a blown up tablet app.
That's because that was precisely what it was intended as --- the idea was to use the same UI on both desktop and mobile, and unfortunately they picked the latter instead of the former to build upon. The former would've resulted in something more similar to WinCE.
I think WinCE fell victim to the technology of the time. I believe today’s higher precision and lower effort capacitive touch screens would have reduced much of the issues that plagued its usability with its crappy resistive touch screens and styli.
Are you speaking of Hololens? A device that only a bunch of people own or can afford is not a justification to break the UI of most desktop computers in the world.
Fluent Design is Microsoft's styling and it included a vision for where they want to get to. Some of that is reflected in the UI you see today in Windows 10.
Every time I have to use UWP apps I feel really sad and angry about how much Windows Desktop UI has regressed.