It made it so much hard to just take in and understand the UI. Glad I'm not the only one that felt that way.

Someone had to make the conscious choice to make it do that, then add the code for it — I’d love to know what their rationale was. I find it difficult to imagine how they thought it’d make things better, and how they could have missed the downsides of it.

I think it’s something they really should fix, because it screams “poor judgment”, which gives a bad first impression of their work.

The animation up and down causes blurriness on my monitor, presumably from aliasing or something

Thanks for the feedback! I removed the animation... hopefully not as jarring now.

Same here!