Two, I'll grant you that you sometimes have to use a custom control, because web moves forward faster than browsers, and so you can't count on a browser-level or OS-level calendar widget being available. But then the issue is, how do you do it. Can the user type in the date directly into your custom field? Is the calendar widget operable by keyboard? Such functionality doesn't interfere with first-time use, but is important to enable users to develop mastery.
A lot of my dissatisfaction with modern UI/UX trends comes from that last point: very low ceiling for mastery. Power users aren't born, they're made. And they aren't made in school, but through repeated use that makes them seek out ways to alleviate their frustrations. A lot of software is being used hours a day, day in, day out by people in offices. Users of such software will be naturally driven towards improving efficiency of their work (if only to have more time to burn watching cat photos). If an application doesn't provide for such improvements, it wastes the time of everyone who's forced to interact with it regularly.
Better forms inputs could very well be useful, I agree.
The recent MSFT + GOOG snogfest announcing major improvements to HTML by ... improving form and input fields in their (GUI-only) browsers strikes me, in light of rather ominous icebergs looming on the HTML horizon, of rather gratuitious deckchair-rearanging. No matter how fine those arrangements might be.
Hold up, your position is that users that prefer something 'easy to use' as opposed to something 'powerful' are immoral? What am I missing here?
If I choose to offer predatory loans which I would never accept for my friends or family to a community that is not financially savvy, and someone calls me out on it, it doesn't fly to say "hey, what do you have against these people taking advantage of my easy to use service?".
As an example, I tried standardizing on <input type="date" /> across our product (hundreds of fields). Within 24 hours we logged >1,000 tickets with users saying they disliked the change. They preferred the fancy datepicker because it let them see a full calendar and that enabled a more fluid conversation with the customer (like "next Wednesday").
Yes, Chrome does offer a calendar for this field type, but Safari for desktop does not (just off the top of my head).
I'm a vim-writing, tmux-ing, bash-loving developer. If it were up to me, I'd do everything in the terminal and never open a browser.
I recognize that the world doesn't revolve around me and my skills, interests and tastes. If a large cohort of my customers tell me they don't want to improve their computer skills and want a fancy UI, who am I to tell them they're wrong? They're paying me. They get what they want.