I honestly don't have a preference on the eye candy present in most operating systems, but I do know that I dislike the agonizing wait introduced to open a new window, watching it's open animation progress frame by frame after I've put my workstation under _Heavy_ load. Removing a lot of the visual fluff can help keep someone productive, even when their machine isn't being the most responsive.
It's entirely preference, dependent on the specs of the workstation and the user's ability to open a couple hundred web browser tabs, 5 VMs, and 2 different O(log n) sorting operations on some database all at once while still maintaing a Skype conversation with a co-worker.