Hey, first of all thank you so much for this. I agree with everything you said there and some of the points truly resonated with me.

I know that it’s VERY hard to be good at many things. I also know how long it took me to get good at UI — hundreds of 99designs / designcrowd designs made for a chance to “win” $25, then later hundreds of designs for some software houses. And ultimately designing at our own company. It took years to get it all and I’m trying to provide some shortcuts (in my upcoming book on UI’s) but still the road has to be taken. Even with shortcuts it won’t be really short.

But that passion and dedication (or call it ambition) is required to make outstanding stuff. And I want to use outstanding stuff, so that’s what motivated me to push the issue here. I want others to make good products. Currently the quality is declining. So something has to be done. Probably not as extreme as I’m painting it, but good look at the subject (like you just showed) can help for more of us to come up with a more refined solution than just my ramblings (oh here I go again ;-)))