Re microwaves, my strategy is to walk into a store, walk down a row of them, pushing buttons, and choose the one that works for me without having to read any directions.
I agree that user interfaces (and Apple is a huge offender with this) increasingly rely on eye-candy.I am very, very pleased with Linux and Gnome2, mainly because I can disable most of the special effects, which removes distractions, and has the benefit of speeding everything up. Unfortunately, many Linux distributions are moving in the same direction as Apple and Microsoft. Change for the sake of change is rarely improvement.