Looks like this is shaping up to be the "Maddox Visual Studio, the best Visual Studio on the internet". Capital letters, black backgrounds, now we just need insulting error messages full of manliness.

I might be OK with the ALL CAPS menu titles if I understood the rationale behind them. Has this been discussed officially anywhere?

Because if not, I can't get beyond the nagging idea that MS is playing some kind of joke that I don't get, and that's a distraction that I don't need.

The best explanation I can come up with is that there's a ton of pressure for Metro this and Metro that. Partners at Microsoft must be upset Apple's market cap is twice Microsoft's, and well, they're gonna fix that no matter what.

ALL CAPS is a highly visible thing they can backpedal on; it's supposed to be sacrificed. Then they can say "See, 95% of the comments were about the menus, and we changed it, so now we're all good!" Deflects from more serious criticism, as this comment demonstrates.

There's a registry value you can set to go back to normal (title case) menus: http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-s...

Nice. Now to figure out how to restore the ordinary window chrome, as the "active" and "inactive" states of the new title bar are identical. Try as I may, I can think of no conceivable rationale for this. Metro notwithstanding, this makes about as much sense as replacing project "files" with "friends"...

They're there to distinguish the menus from their surroundings, since they want to avoid using lines etc. to do that.

The fact that the menu titles consist of text characters isn't enough?

It's the Blend interface and I dig it too. But I like dark windows and stuff in general - I know it's not for everyone.