[RegulatorCountry]

The problem is simple, there’s no hierarchy, they were more concerned with making a “pretty” Mondrian design than creating a logical eye path.

More frequently used icons should be more obvious and more easily utilized, and the more ancillary, secondary icons should be segregated by size, location, or visual “level” as far as reduced contrast or some other visual organizational structure.

The “desktop” metaphor has grown, improved and evolved over the past thirty years or so into a very workable graphical user interface. Websites use it, larger touchscreens use it, even television uses it and it’s typically not even interactive.

Scale is the only reason to move away from it, as in smartphones and tablets. Even then there are much stronger visual differentiations between icons.

Windows 8 manages somehow to be both flat and a visual assault at the same time. Lack of hierarchy and visual differentiation of apps and functions is the reason why, it’s too large on devices with large screens.

The whole idea of totally matching interfaces across all media is only being put forth by Microsoft and it’s not an accurate representation of how the different devices are used anyway. Tone it down on the PC desktop, admit that no style points were won, it just confused their core customers.

[adorno]

More frequently used icons should be more obvious and more easily utilized, and the more ancillary, secondary icons should be segregated by size, location, or visual “level” as far as reduced contrast or some other visual organizational structure.

Most of what you're talking about is more about a visual preference, and not one of logic.

The icons interface is already 20-30 years old, and it was good for a long time, and one that worked well with the mouse.

The problem is not with the organization of applications on the desktop or in the new start screen. Both of them were and are quite capable of being customized and optimized, depending on what one wishes to accomplish. Myself, all of my most used applications reside on the left side of the Start screen, and organized by usage and importance; I also re-size the tiles depending upon what I wish to see and read. The tiles come with categories, and I can change those around too. But, I still haven't felt the need to go back to a menu driven organization for the tiles, and once I got used to where things were, I didn't need to reorganize. I still have a couple hundred applications available within the system, with the majority of them being the apps provide by Microsoft with the system, but, if I can't easily find any of them visually, I can find them even faster by starting to type the name of the application or file, and, Voila!!!, the file or app is immediately found and presented for quick access.

There is a great deal of thought and work that went into Windows 8, and I can easily understand why it was done the way it is. I believe that, eventually, even Apple and Google might have to adopt some of the ways Windows 8 works.