You are spot on, and your 'book analogy' is perfect. If it works perfectly don't change it — that is unless an innovation arrives that offers a significant improvement and that's just as easy to use.
Unfortunately, most so-called UI improvements over the last 20 or so years are not improvements at all, in fact many have been quite regressive. They've annoyed millions of users who've collectively wasted millions of hours relearning what they already knew (and in the end nothing was added by way of new productivity)—and that doesn't include the developer's 'lost' time developing these so-called improvements. It's time that would otherwise have been much better spent fixing bugs, providing security improvements and or developing software for altogether new applications that we've not seen before.
The question I keep asking over and over again is what exactly are the causes behind all this useless 'over innovation'. Why is it done on such a huge scale and with such utter predictability?
Is it marketing's wish for something new? Are developers deliberately trying to find work for themselves or to keep their jobs or what?
It seems to me that many a PhD could be earned researching the psychological underpinnings of why so many are prepared to waste so much money and human effort continuing to develop software that basically adds nothing to improve or advance the human condition.
In fact, it's such an enormous problem that it should be at the core of Computer Science research.
Promotion & NIH management sydrome.
New shiny gets a promotion. Fixing a niche bug in a decades-old stable system does not.
And by the time all the new bugs you've introduced are found, you'll have a new job somewhere else.
So essentially, project managers' bosses not pushing back with a hard "Why should we change this?"
I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think people out to at least be able to “feel” their way around a UI. Lately there’s been so much push for minimalism like omitting scroll bars and such that make it confusing.
But, again that experimentation will root out what works and doesn’t. And new devices like VR of course have yet to be discovered paradigms.
> the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?
To get something that works better.
Despite all evidence to the contrary.