Fellow old guy here. I abhorred the blue text and forced outlines. It was like engineers came up with a UI without talking to people experienced with graphic design. In fact, it looks exactly like every single UI I had ever created until CSS became functionally useful. Now, everyone of my UIs looks like an engineer that took a design boot camp made it instead my code looking like a designer taking a coding boot camp made it.

I know my UIs look bad. I've been in/around graphics/design/desktop publishing/etc for a long enough time to recognize it. I just don't know how to fix it. Now, I just make it functional enough to work, but never to a place that someone would ever think "this is good enough we don't need a designer involved".