Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a matter of fact, I wrote that very program, Switchboard. It's getting late and I don't want to write a whole book about it's design (though I could), but basically here's the story: I saw some mockups Daniel Fore (the project's founder and lead designer) created for a hypothetical system settings app. Here's an example: http://danrabbit.deviantart.com/art/User-Accounts-Plug-19860... I set about coding the app. I…
> Do I change the settings app JUST to look different than OS X, and lose out on the well-established excellence of Apple's design? I want to single that statement out and go on from there. I'm a bit hesitant to write this comment because, well, I'm about to criticize you and Apple, and at least the latter tends to invite downvotes and a not so nice discussion. But I think it is important to try to get that message a…
I think you are missing some context.
Early Apple experiments in GUI design initially used multiple menu bars anchored to the tops of windows, but this was quickly dropped in favor of the current arrangement,[1] as it proved slower to use (in accordance with Fitts's law). The idea of separate menus in each application was later implemented in Microsoft Windows and is the default representation in most Linux desktop environments. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_bar
This was in 1983, when Tognazzini was working on the Lisa, inventing some of the UI concepts we still use and very carefully considering efficiency when choosing them. You may disagree with him—his stance that the mouse is faster than a command line shell is widely controversial—but visual appeal was not nearly his main concern.