Actually it wasn’t clear to me that the dev team was fully aware of the design flaws, because from the very first thread Regenwasser linked, there was so much push-back on someone critcizing the site’s user experience for beginners/newcomers:
And these voices are voice that anoek has reason to trust (though I don’t know to what extent he actually agrees with them) due to their other contributions. It’s just that when it comes to design-related criticisms, the critics’ opinions get dismissed with disdain. There’s nothing wrong with being color-blind to design but when the color-blind have such a strong opinion on color, so to speak, you get the blind leading the blind.