After I read through his tirades I think he came out poorer for the wear. Much of his explanations are simply: blah blah we've done this for a long time blah blah. It's also clear he's opting for what he thinks is experience over Apple iPhone HIG.
The most glaring mistake he made was the background color. I mean seriously did everybody in the room while looking at this say "yeah, 33FFFF is the way to go!"
It's interesting to see how much a primary color (cyan in this case) affects people's initial reaction to things. I think if the UI looked more like this when they first saw it, no one would have really given it much thought:
It just shows that a little bad color can go a long way. We have this a lot with our startup, too-- some people simply can't stand the color scheme we chose for our first beta. It's pretty bad, but memorable. We're working on making things "nice-looking but memorable" instead.
If that image was the UI, people might not have objected as much. There's no horrible color coordinating that was placed in the real UI, which is a major complaint.
Also, might just be me, but those colors look much better inverted though. Short of the red button label. But that's a lot smaller of a problem then the entire UI having bad color coordination.
The most glaring mistake he made was the background color. I mean seriously did everybody in the room while looking at this say "yeah, 33FFFF is the way to go!"