[the_mat]

"most of these sites look stuck in a much older paradigm of thinking about web design"

This needs some explanation. The vim site looks dated, but clearly I'm not enough of an insidery web guy to know why some of these sites are stuck in a much older paradigm.

In fact, I'm kind of lost on the purpose of the entire rant. UI is important? Is that the takeway? Why even write an article about that?

[Jach]

If the vim site is outdated, so is Amazon's. (Okay, Amazon's less so, but I think the taste issue is more from the tabular layout than the lack of gradients or rollovers. Just my thoughts though.) vim itself has a fantastic UX.

As for the rant, I think people need to be reminded of such obvious things quite often. "What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It's overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball." -Jerry Cleaver

[DanBC]

The Amazon site is just hideous on so many different levels. Just awful. As well as looking not great it's hard to use and some aspects (search) are broken.

The Vim site looks a bit dated, but it serves its purpose. I can't really comment without seeing someone do a makeover. When I'm looking for information I prefer a bunch of nicely marked up text rather than snippets of text scattered over various shiny image heavy pages.

The Vim website even tells people how to get involved with making it better - (http://vimonline.sourceforge.net/)