Most of them are decent people, and I'll go for a beer with them any time. But what they bring to the software they're working on usually isn't beneficial.
Put bluntly, they care more about the look and aesthetics of software, rather than its usability and practicality. As these people have become more and more involved with software development over the past 5 to 7 years, we've started to see more and more problems arise.
Long-time Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox users will know what I mean. Each round of "improvements" to the UI by these creative types has in fact made it much worse. The usability has suffered greatly. Unfortunately, these people also apparently have great influence at Google and Apple, so alternate browsers like Chrome and Safari have UIs that are just as bad, if not worse in some ways.
My suspicion is that the same thing has happened at Microsoft, and Windows 8 and Metro are just this problem becoming extremely obvious on a wide scale. If Windows 8 and Metro are huge failures, as they very well may be, it will probably become clear that we need to ditch these UIs that focus on being pretty above all else.
The industry as a whole will need to return to simpler UIs and that are usable, functional and practical. We'll need to leave this dark period behind us, but hopefully we can learn from these mistakes to ensure future applications do not fall victim to the problems we are witnessing today.