> Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here.

I get design/product people sometime that get all caught up in "we need to simplify" or there's not enough whitespace. Every time, the design/product person is not a user of the product, and the result is you ship their improvements, get blistering angry feedback (last time I even got the most prolific user and recommeder of our product calling me on my cell at 11pm) and revert.

> their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency

Exactly this. I think is speaks more to how frequently the designer uses the product versus actual users, and they don't understand the difference between UX for casual/infrequent users and people who spend all day in the product.