I think we are all tired of nonobvious buttons and receding affordances. The point of a GUI is for the program to show you your options. Progressive disclosure is not for minimalism, it’s for teaching at the user’s pace.
A thing I’d like to know the term for seems to happen in tech circles: Many people seem to independently get interested in the same far-from-mainstream concept around the same time, and after some months, suddenly they recognize each other across the landscape and maybe there is a bit of a movement. Last year, everyone seemed to want to talk about Nix and Lisp and Plan 9, not long after I had done my own deep dives of each. Sound familiar?
Regarding button borders, I’ve felt this for some time, but more strongly since I turned my damned scroll bars back on this year, and now I’m seeing it echoed elsewhere (one example). I see it so frequently these days that I’m sure button borders are going to make some kind of comeback. Some watershed blog post will speak to the zeitgeist, some major product will repeat this and make a fuss like it was their idea instead of everybody’s, and then it’s just a matter of roadmaps and release cycles.
While we’re at it, can we bring back the user stylesheet? If everything has to be a fight between the operating system and a product brand, I’d like to arm users too.