Oh, there's a lot of thought there. Back then, people didn't bother thinking about the interface at all, and just pushed the lib provided widgets on the same place they were everywhere (there were plenty of bad metaphors that became prevalent, there were many stuff that research showed that it shouldn't be done, but everybody did anyway).

Today people are always optimizing (for the showroom), always redesigning. That's part of the problem, not of the solution.