[jwells89]

Depends on what's being developed, I guess. No tables/trees is probably ok for a lot of lighter end-user sorts of apps but doing without them for many desktop-first apps and utilities would be rough. Desktop file managers, media library apps, and email apps for example would be quite a lot less useful without multi-column tables at the minimum.

[eternityforest]

I almost never use email on anything but my phone, and Gmail doesn't use a table. They do some tree stuff for the conversation threads, but conversation threads are obnoxious anyway and I have no idea why anyone likes them, they don't reflect face to face conversations well and always create mistakes where someone forgets to reply to all.

I've replaced a lot of tables in my apps with modal dialog UIs, it's nice to have them behave exactly the same on mobile and web, to not have any risk of mistakes due to filling in a box on the wrong row because the label is too far from the box, and it's just generally more pleasant for us non-ADHDers without very good native multthreading support in our minds.

Android style UI is all about encapsulation and reducing the mental context window to the bare minimum, and it really makes a lot of desktop stuff look pretty clunky and confusing by comparison.

VS Code would definitely suffer a lot without the sidebar tree view though, and it does seem like a lot of people prefer the more open instant access to everything that a table provides, rather than clicking through dialogs.

[jwells89]

This is something I have a difficult time agreeing on. I expect a certain level of information density and configurability in desktop UIs, which shoehorned mobile-style UIs don't do well to provide. Deep modality is also a peeve; on desktop there's often no benefit to burying things in mulitple layers of modals — within reason, the most important things should never be more than one click away and great consideration should be put into putting upwards of 2 clicks between the user and their destination.

That said, I do think it's fine to have a simplified mobile-ish UI as an option, but it shouldn't come at the cost of more classical desktop style layouts for those who can leverage them well.

As a sidenote, this is part of why apps like the mac version of Apple Mail and Thunderbird have a considerable number of hardcore adherents, particularly among power users.

[eternityforest]

There's a number of users who can really make great use of the power user tools, but adding multiple UI options can greatly increase work, because a fully modal workflow might need a completely different frontend, and some apps are meant for the mass market.

Degrading the experience for the majority just to make things better for the power users doesn't seem like it's always the best plan unless you're specifically targeting power users.

In the extreme case, UI for power users can result in production databases being destroyed, or someone getting served food allergens because the menu system made it easy to assign wrong items to wrong customers, or someone's entire family photo collection getting deleted by a single command.