I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional.

A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well.

And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.

I think the shift in recent years has been from "UI designers" to "graphic designers". There is a massive difference between the two, but also a lot of conflation. Computer programmers may not be the best UI designers, but graphic designers are even less so, and the "but my art!" graphic designers are the absolute worst.

a main tenet of graphic design is sacrificing your art for functionality. i'm not sure what designers you've been speaking to, but i doubt they're professionals.

I think the difference is between "professionals" as in "gets paid doing this stuff", and as in "actually knows what they're doing".

As evidenced by the discussion here, there seems to be far more of the former than the latter.

That is still the wrong way to look at it. Functionality comes first, then you can make that look pretty. There should be no art in your UI.

I think they’re talking about a certain kind of “brutalist UI” that used to exist because it was the only possible UI for very simple systems (e.g. switches to bang bytes into registers to bootstrap a machine; character-oriented VRAM you wrote to directly; two-character Unix commands to save line-printer ink; etc.) and then was carried forward as a sort of tradition by people used to that restrictive minimalism (e.g. modern uses of Forth; C for application programming; shell commands that are non-interactive even when run directly from a PTY; essential config files in arcane formats that aren’t easily machine-generated, under the expectation that people are doing system bring-up by hand, Linux-From-Scratch style; etc.)

An example of good UI/UX specialists would be the people who designed IBM CUA. Where did they all go?

Given two functionally equivalent pieces of software, customers will choose the prettier of the two. That's all I want to contribute to the conversation.

Yes, same: If your solution users aren't satisfied, then your solution is naively unpragmatic.

That's a totally meaningless sentence.