I think most people were just used to the old UI and resistant to change, so they complained about it. Yet, if you asked someone completely new to computing which UI they'd prefer, they would choose the ribbon.
If anything, placing the Styles menu front and center in the Home tab with live preview has made document formatting very discoverable. I used to receive so many Word docs with manually adjusted fonts and line spacing. Not so much after the ribbon was introduced.
> Yet, if you asked someone completely new to computing which UI they'd prefer, they would choose the ribbon.
How do you know that? This seems like a made up thing I’ve seen it stated by multiple people and it’s probably not true. If you take someone new to computing and show them the old idioms of UI and they’d likely prefer it since it makes way more sense.
If anything, placing the Styles menu front and center in the Home tab with live preview has made document formatting very discoverable. I used to receive so many Word docs with manually adjusted fonts and line spacing. Not so much after the ribbon was introduced.