I agree with him. It's usable, and easy to understand.
It doesn't follow the fads of our time, and thats fine. I struggle to understand why such a superficial demand is at the top of hacker news.
Asking every useful software project to hire designers so it fits the Apple Guidelines (yes I'm exaggerating) seems both unproductive and more likely to drive the programming endeavor further out of the apartments of inventive people and into VCistan
There's a place between hot as hell and cold as a witch's tit that we call Earth. Let's not forget that.
The interface is an unmitigated disaster from tip to toe. There's too much going on. It doesn't need to get hit with the iBooks stick to make it better; it just needs someone with half a clue to delete half the buttons, tabs, modals, windows, panes, lists, checkboxes, and other crap.
Put another way: Eclipse is not the program you want to base your design on.
I found I had the exact opposite experience. There were just so many options everywhere that when I tried to change a few settings or edit book tags, I quickly got lost. I'd like it to be cleaned up a bit and streamlined, not necessarily conform to Apple/Microsoft/Google design guidelines.
Would you mind if car companies switched the gas and break pedals whenever they felt like it. After all, gas pedal on the right is no harder than gas pedal on the left.
Except...the custom is already set.
Most users would rather ignore a program than relearn yet another arbitrary interface when the standard one is good enough.
I could care less what framework is used, and am fairly positively inclined toward Qt in general.
Some frameworks (GNOME in particular) lead to a shit-ton of user-hostile design decisions.
How you use the framework matters a lot. This is where Calibre needs a lot of love. The interface isn't intuitive (I've got v1.25 open now, and ... it's a mess).
I don't think the author is going to make any strides towards improving/changing the UI
[1]http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creato...