I like how that material design stuff looks on my Android. Bite me.

To the people complaining they can’t figure out what is or isn’t a button: How often really does that happen to you? Even the computer illiterate somehow manage on their Androids and websites.

Windows 9x, which gets brought up in these discussions as an example of some sort of perfection, had plenty of “buttons” that had no 3D effect, including menus, icons in icon bars, systray icons and desktop icons. WordPad originally had all the icons up in the icon bar with a 3D effect. It looked like shit and Microsoft stopped doing that in 97 at the latest.

There are considerations other than clarity of intent, like not distracting people from the content with all that ornamentation.

My suggestion would be to put a picture of a baroque church as your background to even out the minimalism if it bothers you so much.