Are you denying the existence of aesthetics in software engineering? If not, then how about the correlation between skill and said taste?
I'm not denying it -- I just took issue with your sweeping statement. Taste when talking about programming languages, frameworks and so on, is individual (like everything else in life where "taste" is involved).
Since Microsoft's Server and Tools Business is a 1+ billion dollar business it obviously tastes good to quite a few people.
Ah--suggesting the question "what is the correlation between having taste and (collectively) being able to spend a billion dollars on tools when there are equivalents to be had for free?"