The brutalist style also meant that I didn't need a UI designer for my applications. With Delphi I was able to create great apps in a matter of days. And users loved them, because they were so snappy and well thought out.
Nowadays it seems I need a UI designer to accomplish just about anything. And the resulting apps might look better but are worse when you are actually trying to accomplish work using them.
Actual interface designers communicate functionality and state through an interface. If your designer is designing interfaces that look good but are less functional for the intended user base, you’ve hired a graphic designer that claims to be an interface designer. It’s not a problem you can generalize to design or designers any more than someone can generalize that web developers suck because the ones they hire to build a serious web app are really Wordpress plugin hacks that don’t even realize they aren’t web developers.
