Why is it always this binary comparison?

It doesn't have to be good looking. It doesn't have to pretty. It doesn't need to be 3d, or need all these fancy bells and whistles. Nowhere has that been suggested (at least in anything I've written), yet people nonetheless frame their answers in this artificial contrast.

Once again: just make the UI intuitive. Make things behave as normal. Grant a few hooks into the GUI code so the community can create their own without having to reverse engineer your game. That is all!