Navigation, Navigation, Navigation
Do all web sites that do the same thing have to look the same? I don't think so. I'm indebted to Charles Frake (in his paper in "The Ancient Mind") for a good example. The Micronesians had a "star compass" for navigation. They used the rising and setting points of stars like Altair to determine directions and could make a precise landfall across 3,000 miles of ocean. To represent it, the "compass" was a square grid.
Navigation experts argued that the system was worthless, because some directions had huge errors. Anthropologists studied the system more closely and decided that itdid work. Everyone who used the system knew the real values for the directions, the grid was just a metaphor. When they understood this, they found a confirmatory passage in Captain Cook's logs: the Micronesians had been trying to tell him how it worked.
Stretching the analogy further than Frake would perhaps want, there are for me two morals here. The first is that any navigation system is a metaphor, and so log as everyone understand it, it doesn't much matter what shape it is.
The second is that even an expert needs to put a navigation system into context before criticising it. The screen design for my 1984 system has some places where the cursor does thing that newcomers say are "silly". But they're there for a reason: the users want, need, or simply like them.