Ugly? Why? Ugly would be Amiga 3.1 with odd proportion based icons and crude widgets.
Win 9x looks functional and usable, with 3D hints everywhere.
Yes, it looks functional and usable, I already said that.
I just find the look ugly. There is no objectivism in preference to how something looks.
I wouldn't see that as "ugly". Highly functional, maybe utterly boring, but not ugly. I mean, w9x looks as boring as an Ikea stool.
Ugly would be, with no arguing, the first editions of Amiga OS. Look:
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga2.html
Windows 95, being designed for 256 colors, looks really fine. Ok, Mac's System 7 it's prettier, without any doubt, but as I said the Amiga OS 1/2.x versions are far worse.
Windows 95 it's boring in the sense of being tied to a corporation based style, with cubicles.
I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly.
Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option.
Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.