I'm pretty tired of all the gratuitous peacocking of web sites too. At this point I wouldn't mind much if all the HTML5 stuff just got tossed in the trash in favor of a simpler stack that made the important things like making CSS layout less agonizing work. I'm sure a lot of us read HN partly because it's so refreshingly unornamented.

This drive to make web "apps" has a lot more to do with politics than it does with user experience or good engineering.