Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"
The answer was never, incidentally.
I've sort of been forced over to Mac (not that it's a bad thing, just a thing), and Paint.NET is perhaps my biggest loss in that transition. I've loved that program since its early days, and is always one of my first installs on any new Windows installation.
Yeah, I've been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I'm not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).
If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn't super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven't heard of it yet. Maybe that's all become web-based.