I wrote the article, so please let me try to reformulate a bit better. When you start with a so complete, consistent and well though base design, it is hard to introduce new original concepts. This is because these new concepts will have to somehow fit nicely with the base design. It is kind of attracting you to simply do incremental improvements not to lose the benefits of the base design.

I am sorry, I am not a designer and not a native English speaker, this makes it a bit harder to formulate this correctly.