What's so peculiar about bad interfaces like that you've described is how it's so utterly obviously not up to the job. It's like looking at certain websites and saying "I can't read this". My energy supplier prints bills with some info in very light grey on white - I literally can't read the text, it's so obviously inadequate, but every day another thousand below-par websites/GUIs/whatever are churned out by people who not only don't understand UIs/websites, they can't detect the most fundamental, evident, basic flaws right in front of them.

And, in many cases, it's even extra work to make it worse than the simple default...

Heck yes. Don't just display the information, let's instead un-fade into visibility so the users have to wait... Good point.

NB. these stupidities are a lot harder to do without jscript, which is another reason I'm against js.