The worst part was, often functionality that was well loved was scraped because there wasn’t time to work it into this redesign. It turned out they would do that on purpose so people would complain so they could go to their higher ups with complaints in hand to justify budget money for a new round of ui design work. Rinse repeat.
Did you get them to confirm this hypothesis? Or did you just figure it out by deduction and projection?
This is an honest question. I work on both sides - dev and design, and so am privy of the driving forces behind the projects.
Sometimes they could include personal agendas but are almost never limited to those.
And I have had cases where I had to ask questions in confidence to uncover the political forces.
Have you had the opportunity to ask such questions and confirm your suspicions?
It’s just like the idea that you first eat with your eyes. For example, eggs with yellow yolks and orange yolks taste the same in blinded tests, but when people can see the eggs they usually go for the orange ones. Periodic UI design updates are needed so that people don’t associate a dated GUI with a dated product.
There is a strong argument for user interface stability. People don't just learn user interfaces, they seep into people's unconscious and muscle memory. It can take a while to learn the idiosyncrasies of a user interface and making changes should have a string justification.
It should be noted that people who are paid to design user interfaces are not paid to use them. Their incentives are to create and tinker. This is a disincentive to do what is often needed: nothing or very slow change.