Most of that hideousness came from Enterprises which set their 'look and feel' in version 4 and never updated it (same happened with Admin processes). I have shown people two systems sat side by side, one with Outlook 2013 out of the box and one with Notes V9 also out of the box. They basically both look and perform the same way for email and as mentioned above it is way simpler to make changes on the Notes side than the Outlook side.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
