[kirb]

Adding onto your point, I’m reminded of the video “Chain of Fools”, where a machine is upgraded from Windows 1.0 all the way through to Windows 8. Once he reaches XP, the theme he configured back in one of the first Windows versions just disappears and gets overridden with XP’s defaults. Then it happens again and again for every version since then, despite the guy changing the theme back to his custom one before each upgrade.

https://youtu.be/vPnehDhGa14

So the phenomenon really started with Microsoft themselves. Sure, the more muted dialog backgrounds and vibrant foreground elements introduced since XP look far better than the Win95-esque greys, but I’m sure people who created their own themes (probably due to disability like color blindness) like their colors better than Microsoft’s.