I'm in love with material design. Google spent A LOT of time designing it and focus group testing it. The idea is that everything is supposed to be obvious / apparent in how to use it. If you've used the gmail app on a smartphone, you immediately feel comfortable in any material design app.

Personally I think it's a huge improvement over flat design. Do you have any specific criticisms, or is it just a subjective aesthetic opinion?

I also think it's an improvement but I wouldn't call it "huge". My biggest problem so far was the lack of "support". By that I mean that a simple to medium difficulty Flat Design project does not require a lot of transitions/animations work. This in turn means that the development time is kept relatively low. In contrast, Material Design emphasizes these visual features.

In my opinion, this framework is the missing piece for MD. I only wished that Google had thought of that and helped speed up the development process.

It's just my opinion, but I still think it's a huge improvement. The oversimplification of flat design sort of put it in an "uncanny valley" of sorts for user interfaces, in my experience. I'd look at a UI and really have to ask myself whether I should be able to click on an element or not.

I see where MUI fits in, but I think Google is also using Material Design to drive polymer and webcomponent adoption.

Being able to import a few elements and make a resizable toolbar is a much better experience than adding a fucktonne of classes, in my opinion.

Yup. Those shadows. The garish colors. Too much animation for animations's sake. Un-necessary ornament (e.g. waves on click). Weird negative spacing. Weird proportions on desktop. Use of mobile "logic" everywhere: how is a tiny hamburger bar ever a good solution on desktop when you could easily display the menu the whole time? Those shadows.

I think the Material Design spec will evolve but the design principles are sound and the paper metaphor is useful. With MUI I tried to focus on the core elements and leave the more stylized design decisions up to the app designer.

I completely agree with you. You are not alone.

More importantly, the feedback from the designs is worse than ordinary layouts.

Does anyone else think the bold colors distract away from the content in Material Design?