UI designers seem to bring about changes now, just to show you that they are busy somehow or that there's sorts of progress. The "Second Watershed" as Ivan Illich describes it in "Tools for Conviviality" has reached the Computer User Interface Design as well. How much more can they mutilate it, before they improve it by going back to iOS 1 design paradigm?

That's a cheap assumption without any data to back it up. What does the 3D animation cost in terms of CPU power?