Quite the opposite, people worked very, very hard to make Winamp even more non-standard via skinning.

didn't winamp look like an... amp?

Skeuomorphism at its prime.

I'm not saying iTunes (Music.app bleh!) would be better reimagined as Winamp 2 but I'm not not saying it.

https://webamp.org

Winamp been really unique, probably because they able to combine that unique design with very practical UX. Even when better players released a lot of users got hard times to switch because of UI, visualizations, skins...

It was also much "bigger" on the earlier screens, because the resolution just wasn't there (I remember finally getting a 1024x768 screen for Windows 95).

> I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).

Wasn't Winamp 2 the gold standard? I remember plenty of music lovers switching to foobar2000 when Winamp 3 came out, because it was, as you said, slow(er).

That is in large part because there was no uncanny valley, so to speak. Where it was different, it was different with a purpose and was intentional about it. Where there was no purpose, like in secondary menus, it still used native widgets like users expected.

The parent is talking about toolkits like Swing where things looked[1] almost, sort of, but not quite like the native system. That wanted to be native, but for technical reasons fell short. These are what many considered to be completely unfit for use. Whereas today, designers wouldn't think twice about applying the same kind of almost-native-but-not-quite theme to match their arbitrary whims and think they are doing the world a service by doing so, the UI conventions (to the extent that there remains any) of the host system be damned.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Gui-widg...

I still cringe every time I get Minecraft to pop up a generic Java UI window on a Mac (of course it now even looks out of place on Windows).