Calling people out as #worseisworse is almost certainly going to be ineffective - attacking people just makes them defensive and argumentative. Instead, can we find useful principles to steer us away from the two bogeymen (hack-it-till-it-works vs useless-ivory-tower-wankery)? Some ideas:
The real world exists. Successful solutions usually come from actually understanding the problem and all it's constraints. Solutions that are dismissed as overly academic tend to fall afoul of solving just the immediate problem and ignoring eg compatibility, switching costs, accessibility to beginners. Similarly, the linux community spent a long time burying it's head in the sane w.r.t. usability and appearance. Sure, people shouldn't care how pretty your UI is. But they do and you can't change that by burying your head in the sand.
Everything has a cost. The benefits of your new solution and the switching cost have to outweigh the pain of the old solution by a large margin. The original 'worse is better' was really an observation that simple solutions that do half the job are often cheaper than a hugely complicated solution that can do everything. If you spend every day coming up with better ways to make widgets, it's easy to believe that everyone wants to have as much widget-customising power as possible and is willing to invest time in learning to get that power. If you actually talk to your users you might find that only having three kinds of widget isn't annoying enough to make them spend time learning something better.
Saying "Sure, people shouldn't care how pretty your UI is." mischaracterizes user interface design as being about prettiness rather than interaction. But that might in fact be your very point and you might actually talking about the mischaracterization of others.
I was thinking of the fact that beautiful software is perceived as more usable, all else being equal (http://www.ergonomicsclass.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Tr...). This is irrational but not controllable. Unfortunately many good solutions lose out in the market because their developers make the mistake of expecting users to be rational econs, rather than accepting reality and working around it.
The real world exists. Successful solutions usually come from actually understanding the problem and all it's constraints. Solutions that are dismissed as overly academic tend to fall afoul of solving just the immediate problem and ignoring eg compatibility, switching costs, accessibility to beginners. Similarly, the linux community spent a long time burying it's head in the sane w.r.t. usability and appearance. Sure, people shouldn't care how pretty your UI is. But they do and you can't change that by burying your head in the sand.
Everything has a cost. The benefits of your new solution and the switching cost have to outweigh the pain of the old solution by a large margin. The original 'worse is better' was really an observation that simple solutions that do half the job are often cheaper than a hugely complicated solution that can do everything. If you spend every day coming up with better ways to make widgets, it's easy to believe that everyone wants to have as much widget-customising power as possible and is willing to invest time in learning to get that power. If you actually talk to your users you might find that only having three kinds of widget isn't annoying enough to make them spend time learning something better.