It turns out that the old medium of the book is still the best approach to telling a long story and proceeding linearly through an argument to build up to a conclusion. Also, from a pragmatic perspective, the book has a huge number of screen shots in it, and these examples would have been difficult to present on the Web and preserve the ultra-fast response times I believe in. Less common actions should certainly not be any more complicated than necessary, but priority should be given to the key user goals. I also recommend defining an information architecture that matches the users' model of the information space and to design a fairly minimalist navigation system to move people around this architecture. I don't think everything should be linked to everything else, but there should be a few global navigation features and much more local navigation than we typically see on current websites.
Users scan, so write for scannability.
The two are partially opposed in that the most gorgeous designs usually are bloated. They should be avoided. Illustrations should be kept small, except for secondary pages where the user has requested, for example, an enlarged product photo. Mainly rely on typography and technologies like style sheets that can enhance appearance without delaying the response time significantly. The knock against your minimal interface design techniques is that they can create visually bland sites.