It was clunky, kind of like Gimp's UI, and felt like a remnant of the 90's. Usable, sure. Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not. Our tools should feel nice.
There's absolutely no comparison between the horror that is/was gimp and the previous blender ui.
Its true that the new ui is an improvement - it looks cleaner and I guess things like left click to select is more intuitive. But the old blender ui wasn't as bad as people make it out to be and lots of things that sucked before like the ui for for hair particles are still pretty bad in the new ui.
I would really disagree, the 2.5–2.7 UI was excellent. It was fast, efficient and extremely customisable to match the style of popular alternatives. The 2.4 era UI was a very different beast however.
The main issues new users have are often related to management of the deliberately non-modal UI which allows you to split the main window up in any way you like, kinda like tmux. With 2.80 tool sidebars now have big clear icons instead of rows of buttons with sometimes impenetrable words written on them.
Ultimately the 2.80 UI is much the same as the 2.79 UI with a more fashionable dark UI and a reworking of some idiosyncratic design choices (changing from right click select to left click select etc).
The old old Blender UI prior to 2.49 (in 2009) was clumsy and felt 90's. But the pre-2.80 UI was fine; very snappy to work with, just a little obscure in some cases.
You must have not learned how to use it then. That, or we have different definitions of the word "clumsy". It has absolutely nothing in common with Gimp, so that makes me wonder if you used it at all.
> Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not
That's subjective, but it did support themes and DPI scaling.
You could justify any ugly design under the "subjective" premise, even pink buttons on a #FF0000 background. But to anyone with good taste, it looks better now.
It was nevertheless already a massive improvement on the early stuff. My first introduction to blender involved three floppy discs, printouts of all the keyboard shortcuts sellotaped around the monitor, and lots and lots of colourful swearing.
It depends, even a decade ago the UI was an absolute disorganized mess. Sometime within the last seven or so years everything was completely reorganized into the beautiful interface we've come to know and love.
Its true that the new ui is an improvement - it looks cleaner and I guess things like left click to select is more intuitive. But the old blender ui wasn't as bad as people make it out to be and lots of things that sucked before like the ui for for hair particles are still pretty bad in the new ui.