If I were at Apple's leadership I'd consider that a major blindspot and focus deeply on fixing it.
- He wasn't the only one pushing it? Lemay was described in Bloomberg as one of the key people behind Liquid Glass
- The vision wasn't as bad as it turned out to be, but it was rushed because of yearly releases and Apple having nothing to present?
- None of the senior leadership use the devices beyond occasionally, so they couldn't care less what's happening to the UX?
On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction. Hiding essential feature on hover (notification's close icon, elapsed time on Apple Music, proxy icon, etc), poor contrast, legibility, background/foreground differentiation, was a long running process.
On your third point, I think it's possible and, if that's the case, deeply troubling.
Again: why do you keep assigning Dye God-like powers? There wasn't just Lemay. There's no end of senior designers and senior product people, Federighi and his minions etc. at Apple.
In the end we still got Liquid Glass.
> On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction.
Indeed. Easily hundreds of people across several platforms saw this direction. Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
He was VP of Design. That's as close to being design-god at Apple as you can get.
> Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
I don't think that's a widely held belief. What's puzzling and scary to me is how so many people either stayed silent, failed to disagree or quit. How a deeply entrenched design culture can so easily crumble.