I mean also the printing things are probably not designed to have like, shiny inks and such, so with mass producing books, its harder to do the unique printing of the first character, but if /could/ be done. Just, no one wants to badly enough.

Its the free market.

Personally, I prefer even simpler sites than this one, for the most part. (Unless the site does something, I'm not sure I think that js is really needed at all, unless you want an analytics thing.)

That is, unless the other things on the site are the point of the site, in which case of course more stuff is nice.

I don't think its true that preferring a simpler format for the information is necessarily a preference for a lack of aesthetics, but rather a different aesthetic preference.

You know the general way that webpages of students on university websites often look?

At addresses like cs.schoolwebsite.edu/~JRandom/index.html ?

Usually a blank white background, black text, a bit of formatting, but not very much, works fine on pretty much any browser you could think of?

I think there is a specific aesthetic to these sorts of pages, and I personally appreciate that aesthetic.

I don't think that that aesthetic should be considered to be an illegitimate aesthetic choice.