The old "Pages" icon was instantly recognisable. The new one looks, at first glance, exactly the same as text edit and notes.

I don't think that the UI actually needs to get out of the way. We humans are perfectly able to ignore even the most obnoxiously designed mess (cf. banner blindness). But we are not very good at picking from many similar-looking things. Replacing the colorful sidebar icons with simpler monochrome versions now requires us to actively look for the icon you need, instead of just picking it intuitively.

Contrary to popular belief these days, contrast is not the enemy.

Getting a bit fed up of listening to fellow designers preaching about "cognitive overload" over a few button shapes and icons then proceeding to ship designs where all the controls are un-styled blue text with the occasional semi-abstract line art icon.

Things looking better actually has a positive effect on usability.

I'm a long-term Inkscape user, they recently 'improved' the icons; it all looks wrong (but handsome in a minimalistic, low-visibility of chrome, sort of way) and disturbs my workflow considerably.

I'm not sure why the parent comment was downvoted. If the above statement was intended to mean that being consistent and intuitive is more important than aesthetics then that is almost certainly true, in my experience designing and testing UIs. Of course, the ideal is to have it all by using the aesthetics to support the functionality. Being attractive and being functional aren't mutually exclusive.

This is where, IMHO, a lot of generic minimalist/flat designs following the current trend go wrong: they sacrifice so much detail and so many possible ways to be visually distinctive or interactive that what remains inevitably all looks very similar and loses some of the visual cues that could help to guide the user in how the system works.

But being fashionable and being functional are often opposing forces.

Seems to me flat web design was a reaction as the antithesis of an over-indulgence in skeuomorphism. We just appear to have thrown out a lot of affordance and visibility in that reaction.

I sort of understand, but no-one outside my family uses my desktop and when I worked in an office it was just me or the IT support people, so how is it about branding in the general situation. For media stuff everyone is likely to be using the default.