But so what? If it sucks, it sucks, and we should call it out as such! How will we ever improve anything if we can't highlight what's wrong with the current solution?
My go-to example in this regard is the Microsoft Office ribbon. I remember, when the ribbon was introduced, I saw a presentation from a Microsoft employee (I can't remember if he was a developer or a product manager) going over the extensive testing that Microsoft did with focus groups to "prove" that the new UI was superior to the previous menu-based one. I remembered being both very impressed with the ostensible rigor of the process, and disappointed with the result. All that work, all that testing to delude themselves into believing that a UI where elements moved around, and weren't in predictable locations was going to be something that users (especially experienced users) would prefer.
And sure enough, even to this day, I still see users (both new and experienced) struggling with the ribbon. It sucks! And the fact that I know a lot of very smart people worked on it doesn't change that fact. In fact, it makes it worse. It would be one thing if such a horrid design were the result of a haphazard design process, implemented by incompetents. But it's not. It's the result of a lot of very smart people Goodharting themselves into believing that they've found the one weird trick to make their software both powerful and easy to use.
I strongly believe, that, if in the early days of the ribbon, someone had stood up and said, "This sucks!" things might have gone in a different direction.