Comment by ahartmetz

It is perhaps a problem that there are a lot of visual designers around, because that is something for which a classical education exists and which has a certain prestige, and very few UX designers, for which no classical education exists and which seems to have little prestige. Good UX design is usually not fancy, form follows functions isn't flashy, and the whole thing seems kinda nerdy (not cool).

About the return of skeuomorphism, I do believe it's happening because people are fed up with flat everything in two colors, but I wish there was less oscillation around the center. As many have mentioned, Win2k was very good, and it was a middle ground between the extremes we're seeing today. Actually, it was extreme in one way: you could tell what a UI element was going to do without trying to click every pixel and seeing what happens.