@rl_dane I don't know what these designers are thinking. But it appears flashiness is preferred over functionality and ease of use. My biggest gripe on GTK and also Windows is just how freakin' narrow the scrollbars are. I find myself more and more using the keyboard to scroll thru web pages.
I love #xfce but newer versions of GTK seem to have truly wonky design choices. I never recall GTK 2.0 having these problems. The GTK 2 themes in both GNOME 2/MATE and XFCE were sane and had better ergonomics.
As crude and ugly as the raw #openbox themes are it's becoming preferable to use that over anything GTK-related.
Yes Openbox is about as minimal as you can get but at least the stock config only has rad resource usage, like 4MB of RAM.
Oh, there is also an alternative menu for #MATE. It's not as clunky. FYI.