When we shared the RC design preview with you, we expected the uppercase menu would generate mixed feedback and emotions. We had seen similar reactions from early adopters and from our own internal users prior to posting about it. [1]

So then they said they had been "thinking about it" (why a lot of thinking was necessary is beyond me), and that "using uppercase for the menus was not an arbitrary decision" because they needed "to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences".

Then they tried to say that "some of you" won't like the change and that these people have "been very direct in expressing your opinions on this subject".

In other words: they got told it was an absolutely awful decision from the very start by beta testers and their own test team, but ignored it because, well, "consistency". Then they released it and they got almost total user revolt, but they can't back out now because, well, "consistency". But they now allow you to change to letter case with a registry tweak, after all - Microsoft know better than their end users, even when those end users are screaming for them to change a fairly fundamental UX error.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-de...