That's because contemporary designers are obsessed with trends, frameworks and aesthetics. When Dieter Rams designed Braun products, he didn't have a UI framework. He deeply thought about interaction and feedback to the user.

Contemporary UI trends bother me except one: websites like drewdevault.com and text.npr.com are refreshing.

That’s the problem with software. There are two categories of software: software that their developers use themselves, and software made for other people. Visual Studio is the prime example of a software made by people who use it, it continuously improves (minus a few hiccups), it is made for the most used functionalities to be at your fingertips, it doesn’t hide stuff in layers of submenus, etc. The list is long of software made for others, and the general rule is “fuck it, good enough”.

This is also why I believe the Windows 8/10 developers must be working on macs.

I agree with your comment except Visual Studio part. Everytime I use Visual Studio it feels like I'm using a big pile of hacks of varying age.

What language do you write in using Visual Studio?

I use it with C++ and C# and I can't say stress enough how amazing it is to use with C++, compared to the teeth-pulling experience of using xcode for the same tasks (some of which are impossible in xcode, edit-and-continue for example, set next statement).

It might be just me, I use Visual Studio to write C# (not my "first" language) plugins for an older (non C# core) tool. Sometimes I also use Visual Studio to manage SSIS ETL packages, but I need an older VS version because they are not always backwards compatible - this leaves me with three versions installed on my computer - 2015,2017 and 2019 - each for something else.

To be honest what I don't like is the neverending march of tiled frames for everything - the whole program is one frame, then i have one frame for the code, one frame for the solution explorer, two more frames for error list and output, another one for properties and so on. A lot of screen space is taken by just blank spaces or dividers.

Another thing that I didn't like was that the 'Comment selection' option is hidden in Edit -> Advanced -> Comment selection. You also have to use two keyboard shortcuts in succession to comment something (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C) and the uncomment shortcut is different (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U). All this while Ctrl + / does nothing and could do both at the same time.

I often need the whole VS solution and not just the code when I need to copy paste the project to a different folder or a different machine.

Have you tried moving the frames around a bit? I normally dump all the frames down the bottom particularly for debugging.

The double-keystroke thing is a bit odd yes, and the menu is hidden a bit far away for ease of navigation. Still, it could be worse - it could be a RIBBON!

From my own experience interacting with Microsoft developers, there are more using Macs (with Boot Camp dual boots) then you might expect.

But it's hardly a majority (or even that many at all). If you're developing primarily on the CLR or for one the the many Microsoft sub platforms, the first-party tooling is actually quite good. It's only when you need to do both, or stray from one a bit too much, that things become arduous.

Generally however, the Mac users are almost always essentially Microsoft developers who have to target both Windows and Linux and don't want to deal with managing/maintaining a Linux daily driver. MacOS is "close enough". It's pretty representative of the non-Microsoft developers in similar situations.

And no: the Linux Subsystem isn't enough for them either.