Yes, very funny. Well, I'm a CS graduate, and I have no qualm with using iTunes. My colleague in the next workstation is a PhD from Cambridge and he uses iTunes too. Might want to expand your horizons about what is a "generally accepted piece of crap" and what is a personal preference.
>I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I want things to be. All in exactly the same way that I know what colour I want the walls to be painted in my home and where I want my furniture. By breaking UI conventions because some idiot thinks that he knows what colours and shapes my monitor should display, I am unable to dictate what my own things should look like.
That you "know what you want" doesn't mean what what you want is also right for you. For example, every obese person that craves for McDonalds also, er, "knows what he wants". But it would be better for him, in the long term, if he was denied that.
Furthermore it's not just about "you" or "me".
For one, the "idiot" you refer to is the programmer, and he also wants to express himself in his product. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
Second, for UIs in general to evolve people must come up and try different approaches, and, yes, break for the conventions.
Third, your argument doesn't even make much sense. You say you "know what you want", but at the same time you despise programmers making customized UIs instead of following the OS guidelines.
It would surely make much more sense to despise OS companies making their UI guidelines.
For, if a programmer makes a custom looking app, you can buy something else, but if your OS vendor comes up with designs you don't like you have no recourse except some basic customizations (which might not even apply, e.g you cannot change how the menubar works or where it is placed on OS X) or the painful switch to a different platform altogether. So you have to suffer their UI decisions in almost every apps.
>To hammer the point in further with another example, CSS was designed with, err, designers in mind and look at what a head-fuck that turned out to be. Leave the thinking to people who know how to think - we'll tell you what needs prettying up and how to do it right.
The implication that designers don't know how to think is as idiotic as is preposterous.
And the insinuation that non-designer "thinker" can just "tell 'em what needs prettying up" and we'll get good GUIs (as if design work is mere "prettying up"...) is even more laughable.