I often feel like I’m the only person who likes the sort of extreme skeuomorphism of Apple circa 2007: it wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have the soulless corporate feeling of flat UI styles.
Skeuomorphism has the problem that everything looks like a photo - it doesn't advertise what's usable clearly either.
The problem with flat UIs is that they're also in the middle of abandoning any conventions on what's interactable as well.
Ironically Windows circa 3.1 and definitely by 95 had this nailed: is it greyed out? 3D? You can interact with it. Not 3D? You can't. 3D but greyed out? It is contextually disabled.
Simple and clear at a glance. What that interface got wrong was the MDI motif - multiple document interface never really worked as well as Microsoft wanted, although if they'd made the leap of making it tiling by default they would've got there.
The worst thing is the new dialer. It's bullshit. It took me an hour to figure out how to paste a phone number into the damn phone. Turns out, you hold your thumb over an invisible UI element and then the paste popup appears miraculously. I nearly threw the damn thing across the room when I figured it out. Throw in a box and remove that headache, although it won't be nearly as sexy I'm sure.
You definitely are not alone - I still love the old school Aqua UI. I just switched to Linux after almost two decades on Macs, and the primary reason I chose Elementary OS and Window Maker (I use both) is their somehow retro look and feel.
