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Skipping the "UX Pro" creds, I trust that the rest of your post is correct: Google has well-paid UX engineers from the best places.

That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).

UX will eventually become fully personalized to the user's preference rather than the latest fashion vaguely branded to the site owner. If they could figure out how to personalize the UX as well as they personalize ads...

Bad websites don’t imply dumb UX people, more likely bad incentives and objectives.

The new GMail seems like a more functional “new Reddit”. It achieves a certain look and was probably metric driven, but didn’t really address what users care about.

As a casual GMail user, I like it. But it would drive me crazy if I had to work with it all day with my work mail volume.

I wouldn’t call Stanford third rate for UX. That being said, I suspect there are too many lazy, entitled, people at Google.