Took the words out of my mouth. I'd prefer a UI element designed for Windows 2K over most anything designed later (with some, but few, exceptions).

I'm not sure I would characterize newer UI as more hostile. Some better adjective might be infantilizing, dumbed-down - for the most part; or there's a dichotomy between the UI for dummies part and arcane, not-well-documented, difficult-to-locate parts. This dichotomy was somewhat less pronounced in the past.