The eye-candy in question is really more about usability of the GUI when people are on terrible computers with bad network connectivity and terrible UI input restrictions. I am, of course, speaking of smart phones.

The smart phone design aesthetic has taken over and is now constantly being used in places where the whitespace is a waste and the giant buttons make things terrible. Canonical may have finally given up on "convergence" but few other companies have woken up.

The real "convergence" is all about bringing the plain old desktop design aesthetic to the smartphone. "Bad network connectivity" is a fiddly modem connection at 300 baud, compared to that what you get on smartphones is excellent. If one can browse HN, reply to comments and even do operations like voting/flagging comments on a smartphone, that's proof enough that "usability" is no obstacle.

>a fiddly modem connection at 300 baud, compared to that what you get on smartphones is excellent.

No, both those examples are terrible. The 300 baud modem because of the low speed and the smart phone LTE connection because the round trip time is highly variable and TCP backoff applies a heavy penalty. Additionally, most smart phone internet connections don't have ports or even an ipv4 and are behind Carrier-NAT. Given that, I'd prefer the 300 baud modem.