> So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Well I've got a pretty recent design degree and have a lot of exposure to what people are thinking and how people are practicing in this field. If you've got some empirical evidence that challenges that, I'm happy to consider it.

> Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication.

Yes, I've been in the field for decades. For most of the internet's history, web design was done by "web people" and not designers. Additionally, lots of it has been done by visual designers and not interaction designers-- that yields very different results.

> It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

So where's your non-anecdotal support for this absolute statement?

> Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

Sorry, no. Most people who put marketing sites together come from advertising, which is almost exclusively filled with visual designers. There's nearly no reason for a marketing website to employ the services of either a UI designer or a UX designer. There are a lot of people-- as you can see in this comment section-- that call themselves UX designers that don't even realize how wrong they are. Just like there are lots of people who cargo-cult PHP snippets from tutorials that call themselves software developers, or even software engineers. Again, if you have any non-anecdotal evidence that says otherwise, I'm happy to look at it.

> The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The fact that you say UI/UX is telling. While a UX designer may concern themselves with UI design, they are not even close to the same field. UX is about product design, overall. UI design is a communication discipline in the vein of HCI in which the goal is to communicate the functionality of a program to a user. While there are lots of colloquial misuses of these terms in companies that don't really focus on these things, any organization that has codified design practices and structured design roles that actually needs to define what these people actually do all day uses them correctly.

> The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.

I'm an art school trained designer having switched careers from web development. Most engineer types I've encountered call anyone that touches the front-end without coding a UI/UX designer, and think the purpose of design is aesthetic. I've had dozens of discussions on HN, specifically, with developers that think exactly that. Within the big UX organizations I've worked with and fellow UI designers, what I've said is the rule rather than the exception. Go and look at UX portfolios for people with professional experience in the field-- they're full of case studies, not visual design, and CERTAINLY not flashy visual design.