I wonder if this is in a way tangentially connected to McLuhan's notion of 'the media is the message'. That is, what we really, often, seem to be trying to communicate
is the form. The form is the primary. Notice how even the most blase and normative and familiar story is rendered anxiety generative when paired with a non-normative form (most David Lynch movies, for example). Whereas, even the most seemingly brutally intrusive content, is eventually normalized by what we might call normative story-telling structures (most so-called transgressive horror films, for example). This, perhaps, is why we react so negatively to form, rather than content, as we instinctively know that form will neutralize any potentially-revolutionary content. And, of course, this spills over into every other area. After all, the major reason sited by those on the analytic side of the philosophy divide most often cite the seemingly apparent obscurantism (form and the obsession with form among the likes of Heidegger and Adorno and Hegel and Kant) of the construction of continental philosophy as its major detractant.
So it's not what you say, it's how it's said. Which would go far in explaining why traditional liberal democratic practitioners always seems ultimately to fail in arguing against nazism, facism, etc. (That is, not only are they fighting with different weapons, but are on different fields on different days.)
So it might be possible to say that it is not design that distracts from the content. It is the design which is the content. The practicality is the reinforcement of an already-established form of cognitive mapping. In this way, it can be viewed as having parity with religion in society (though in some sense subordinate, as it is form, again, that underlies the function of the religious experience), in the sense that perhaps a given society is propagative-force for those forms on a kind of meta level, so, then, to change the forms is to change the society, the potential injection of a type of medical retro-virus (if attempted consciously), if you will, which, of course, as in the case of any external invasion, would likely trigger a sort of immune response.
True, there may be some absorption and incorporation of a rival form, but only rarely, and possibly, in parallel with biology, the more complex the organism, the less likely such would be possible. And, in any regard, absorption and incorporation would either have to be done is such a fashion as that only those aspects that do not create fundamental change are incorporated, which, in effect, means the intrusion is still neutralized, in the way a dominant culture an import cultural artifacts / aspects from another subordinate culture, a biological organism can, etc, or such absorption would give rise to a new form, meaning the effective annihilation of prior contestant forms.
(incorporation of pagan myth could be an interesting example of this phenomenon. Notice how the content can remain the same when encoded into the new Christianized form, and the same content ceases to be of the pagan culture, ceases to propagate the pagan culture.)
It would be interesting to see if form could be separated from content that it wouldn't then be possible to reconstruct, recognize, and/or recreate any given culture.