I once worked for a company where the Marketing department believing anything that was not dark text on a white or off-white background was hard to read. Amazing how a couple individuals could off handedly discard an entire rainbow based on a single mis-guided principle: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-...

The fascinating thing about graphic designers is, if you use Photoshop then what do you get, a tool palette, in stark black and white, full of cryptic symbols. In other words, they tacitly acknowledge that for a busy professional, learning a "difficult" interface is fully worthwhile. Yet they continue to peddle "design" as if this isn't the case...

In the case of Photoshop I think it's more that an established system with a large userbase can't significantly change its UI without significant negative feedback (see Office Ribbon).

The pallet interface is also what we're used to. Most people, were they to set out to build a pixel pusher app, would start with a basic pallet UI. Unless of course they were specifically aiming to get away from that.

Also, Photoshop is a perfect example of "The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are".

I guess it's just preference, but you can see this on bloomberg.com as well. I find it blinding when switching from a page with a white background (as most have). When using the terminal itself, its not as bad for some reason, but then again I don't use it on a daily basis.