Personally I love the clean, flat, minimalist look of the Valhalla reverb plugins. There's absolutely nothing to distract you from the task at hand. The design is modern, slick and very attractive. But most importantly, a design like this is EASILY RESCALABLE! Eyes not so good? Simply resize the window. I would choose a fluid GUI over a photographic hardware bitmap any day of the week. The "realistic" interfaces are a novelty for the first day you use them, that's it.

 
I like the knobs and the meters.  I really like the plugin photo realism and Sonar's pseudo-realism.
 
I don't like chips and scratches at all.  None of my real stuff is beaten up like some of the plugins I see.
 
The controls on the VC-64 are tiny on my screen.  Playing around with it following its mention in this thread, I discovered the Windows magnifier.  That's really useful and my aging eyes will be using it for a lot of things going forward.
 

I think Sonitus has it right ... Having a plug GUI resemble Optimus Prime's taint isn't impressive to me at all.

microapp

jackson white
 
http://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/effects.php
 

Nice. Do you use any of these and if so how do they sound.

I started with tools such MMultiAnalyzer and MAutoAlign so hopefully they don't -sound- like anything. I've become somewhat disciplined with plugin purchases (rack space used to be a real world limiting factor, lost that with a shift to DAWs) but given my positive experience with their products, expect to add more. A couple of things which work for me are the generally consistent access to a wider range of parameters for an FX, more intuitive visualization for setting a value, and a feature for quickly comparing different favorite settings. Big plus for workflow. They offer a number of 'color' FX and I expect them to be very usable. I used the MMultiBand Tremelo to dial in a groove on a track done by a staunch old school guitarist that worked so much better than his modded Fender that he decided to give Sonar a try. Had nothing to do with Sonar actually, but the magic of a groove coming to life was pretty compelling.
 
The MAutoDynamicEQ looks interesting and might a better investment than Ozone if you already have a number of other mastering FX. Plus the price is quite reasonable compared to a number of over-hyped over-priced vintage emulations and they offer a free bundle which is how I got my start. 
 
Took a little getting used to, but the value of consistent interface across different FX and the ability to re-size them is worth repeating given your original comments. And finding my ears are becoming more evolved than my eyes, which is a good thing if your business is sound.