Finally somebody other than me said it.
Most people will just shrug it off as "The logo is ugly, so what?". But please consider this:
The thing is not that the logos are ugly; The thing is that GNU is spectacularly bad at (graphic) design. Design might not be important for gcc, but if a project has no one with design expertise, their [G]UIs will (and do) suck. You can see this for instance with just about any open source crypto application ever.