I genuinely think this is the case, and why products don't have a LTS interface, even though they ought to. Sign me right up for the 10 year LTS interface. I can't recall any features in gmail that were added that I actually use besides labels, which was an early launch feature. But it's been redesigned about 9 times in the last 20 years, each time with increasing white space and/or a slightly different font.

LTS interface is expensive for minimal benefit.

More expensive than re-designing it every 2 years?

If you need an LTS interface you might be best with one of those old people smartphones with the big numberpad.

If you need change for the sake of change, then maybe your time is worthless.

I can't think of a single feature my phone has gained since at least 2015 that I use. Actually it looks like the nav bar and material design 1.0 came out in 2011? The smart phone was largely "done" being developed by 2014. That's the year we got formal support for "use the flash LED as a flashlight" feature. Nexus 5 had wireless charging in 2013. Other than that the only reasons to upgrade is forced obsolescence or battery failure, or better quality phone camera(s).

Definitely. Those pesky UI engineers are always rewriting and refactoring and reworking stuff. Me, a talented backend engineer? I would never. My code was perfect initially and there's no pressure to show deliverables from my manager since they know I'm the best.

Huh? Sure, UI code can change, no one is arguing that but API changes, just like for backend, need to be extremely thought out and slow. For UI Engineers, UI is API to the user and for some reason, when they blow up their API, they get praised for it. Most backend engineers are change API at much much slower rate.

UI engineers should be like vaccines. If they do their job well, you should never see why they were needed.

That so many do not see why vaccines are needed is a serious problem.

Sure, but what is happening here is basically the equivalent of us engineering current-vaccine resistant viruses, along with new vaccines, and releasing them all together, so that people know vaccines are important and are forced to get new vaccines to be safe.

We shouldn't do that, in the same way we shouldn't make sure people know UI is important by changing it completely every n years.