I do not know why I got marked as flamebait. I clearly stated it was my personal opinion and I meant every word without intent of inciting a flamewar. Mods are on crack.
That said, to me the ideal design of GUI so far has been Windows 95, with toolbar autohide. Horrible OS but imho best GUI ever. Clean, simple, rectangular without the horrible rounded corners. Grey background, forgettable fonts, and equally neutral pointer shapes.
I have always hated icons and preferred text instead but I have yet to see a GUI with labels instead of pictures by default. Other than that - Windows 95 got most things right.

So now I know who made the Mac so insufferably ugly. For me it was a retch at first sight. I think I may be the only one in the world but I have consistently hated every single artistic and stylistic choice Apple ever made with their GUI (their hardware designs sometimes look OK, e.g. iPhone 4)

Not really. It is not too hard to make things robust. There is no reason why for instance a sub-folder could not be mounted even if the parent folder is corrupted. Just make every home directory a separate partition and mount them all under /users. If /users gets corrupted, mount discoverable user partitions somewhere else (e.g. /users-restore). So root folder could still be robustly accessible even if /users or /home were corrupted.
In any case, the point is that complexity should be within the filesystem, not on the user end.

I have no issue with your version either.
But my rationale on /var is that logs is something an admin consumes (like any other form of media - books, movies, etc). So logs that a given admin would care about should be presented to them and those they do not should not.

Example. A server in a household. One person reviews hardware related logs. Another takes care of internet facing services and security and the relevant logs. No-one looks at all the logs so there is no need for central repository. If multiple admins are registered to take care of any aspect of the system they get a separate copy of the logs. Hard drive space is cheap. Duplicate and personalize, don't centralize.

First off, logically /lib should be a subfolder in /bin since libraries are needed to make executables works and are not an entity in themselves.
Rename /bin into /programs or some-such for clarity. /dev, /proc and /sys also belong together though I am not sure how. Maybe under /devices.
Crap like /etc should be all collected in /config or something clearly named.

No need for /sbin, /tmp, /var, /root, /home, and /media.
Make a /users folder. This would contain all user info. This is where /root belongs logically. And /sbin should be in /root logically. /tmp should only be present on server installs. A distro aimed at personal use should not have it. /var should be renamed to something clear like /logs and should be present in every user folder, not globally. /home should not be there at all. Just have /username (including /root) in /usr. /media, /mnt and other crap like that just needs to be in /dev

Bottom line: when a user fires up a GUI browser for their filesystem, they should see just a few key directories and their purpose should be obvious from naming without any training in Unix. /programs, /devices, /users, /config
On server installs, add /shared.

BTW, I am not a fan of oversimplification either. Do not dump all things into something dumb like /unix or /linux or /posix. The whole /windows business is a mess. Users are afraid of even peeking inside this huge folder.

Removing unencumbered open code/GUI/interface etc. which is known to work for no good reason is unhealthy.

This does not seem like a healthy trend.

One more thing: It is possible for human labor to contribute to economic growth but only if the worker was not adequately compensated. So in the extreme case, if you take a grown man and stop feeding him while demanding work then anything he will do until he dies is indeed pure growth of the economy. However, assuming efficient labor market and fair compensation, commodity labor does not create wealth. And the only reason non-commodity labor like research generates wealth is that it is never fairly compensated for (you just cannot fairly compensate the inventor of the wheel with all the resources of stone age economy).

Piano tuners create no wealth. They are much like a stable cell in your body: they do something and consume some resources but they do not contribute to the growth of your body. When you grow from baby to adult, that growth fundamentally comes from the nutrients you ingest (new natural resources) - nothing in your body generates growth without new resources. And conversely, take away new resources and the body wastes away (go see some concentration camp pictures circa WW2). Likewise, society only grows when new resources become available or new ways to use resources are found (kind of like human survival improved after a mutation which allowed people to process lactose and hence drink milk).

You might understand this from a different perspective. How many piano tuners does a society have? Well, there is some market size for that niche. What determines the niche size? Global economy. What determines the size of the global economy? Certainly not the size of the niches otherwise we'd be back to circular reasoning. So what is it? Well, we know many economies that collapsed due to internal contradictions so that can set the size of the economy. But the maximum achievable size is set by resource availability.

Now as far as planned vs market economies - I did not pass judgement on either. Market economies are susceptible to bubbles while centralized economies are susceptible to corruption, poor decision making due to power struggles in the bureaucracy, and hubris of top managers. So no, centralized economies do not look good by comparison. Quit putting words in my mouth. My point was simply that trade is not an inherently good thing.

First, about trade. Your example is of a good trade which stimulates usage of resources available and seeking out new ones. Notice that the trade was highly uncorrelated - different parties sold different goods and everything was demand driven. My point was that much of trade is correlated - where people buy inherently worthless or not quite so worthy trinkets because it is a fad (yes, including real estate a few years ago). This does not stimulate anything - yes, stuff is being produced to fulfill demand but demand is artificial and so the entire trade is unsustainable. The things it stimulates are not really needed and dissolve at first market crash. In that respect, trading shirts when the only demand is food is a good metaphor. this is what we were doing a few years back essentially. We need new sources of energy (new food so to speak) but we trade trinkets like houses which do not address the problem and do not stimulate dealing with the problem.

As far as where wealth comes from... Uh, do you know what went into making every single plant that makes stuff? Discoveries of how to make stuff and the natural resources. Nothing else. That is where wealth comes from. If no new discoveries are made, what will happen is that first every product will turn into a commodity with near zero margins, then when resources run out, the product will cease to be made. The plants are just a physical realization of research so you are making my point here. And for sure, plants have little to do with trade. Trade just connects supply and demand, it does not enable supply side and does not guarantee that demand is organic/sustainable. So healthy trade provides positive feedback for wealth creation, it even helps establish what wealth is in many cases but it is not responsible for wealth creation.