You can switch to Linux, but unfortunately it's been degrading along similar lines.
Big, wrong ideas are destructive, and the two biggest, wrongest ones right now seem to be: "desktops are just out-of-date tablets", and "the only good affordance is a dead affordance".
Affordances are what make computers humane, and there's a world of difference between how phones are used (mostly social), tablets are used (mostly media consumption), and how desktops are used (mostly productivity).
The visionaries in charge of all three of Windows/OSX/Linux are of similar mind about the "big ideas", and it's caused a lot of grief for productive people.
I disagree regarding the "tablet" point - while the major DEs take some UI inspiration from tablets, in general they're still very much desktop-oriented. People often complain about Unity for being "too much like a tablet", but actually try using it on a tablet and it's not well-suited at all in its current form.
You might want to look at KDE and XFCE though - both are sticking more to traditional Linux desktop ideas than Gnome and Unity.
I don't think we actually disagree. The tablet/desktop convergence is them trying to sit between two barstools - true that they're still mostly toward desktop, but they aimed for both and hit neither.
And agreed on your second point, using XFCE right now.
In UI terms, it's any sort of visual clue for the user to do something. A button might be drawn as a "raised" thing inviting you to press it down; a window corner that has larger and visually obvious "drag handles" where you can grab it to resize the window; that sort of thing.
Big, wrong ideas are destructive, and the two biggest, wrongest ones right now seem to be: "desktops are just out-of-date tablets", and "the only good affordance is a dead affordance".
Affordances are what make computers humane, and there's a world of difference between how phones are used (mostly social), tablets are used (mostly media consumption), and how desktops are used (mostly productivity).
The visionaries in charge of all three of Windows/OSX/Linux are of similar mind about the "big ideas", and it's caused a lot of grief for productive people.