Nothing to do with this project per se, but I still do not understand the deal with material design on the web. I can understand the case for it's use in small screens and maybe falling back to it based on media queries makes sense but I'm yet to see a good looking website on a laptop using material design.
I tend to enjoy it, mostly because it's a good "baseline". The phrase "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" comes to mind.
It might not be the most beautiful, it might not be the most information-dense, it might not be something that an actual designer would want to implement everywhere, but it works consistently, and it works pretty well on all screen sizes and shapes and input types.
It's a set of guidelines to hold your hand in making something that's not terrible even if you have literally no design experience, and I think it's doing a great job in that.
But, I also really like the look of MD. The animations, the "inky" taps, the shadows, the movement. It looks nice to me, it helps give a sense of "where" parts of the app live, and it tends to be consistent enough that if I notice an app doing it, I can generally grasp the "where would I go for this" much faster than other designs.
I generally like Material Design, but sadly I have to agree with you.
Contrary to Bootstrap, you can't just drop in Material Design and expect it to look decent. You actually have to adhere to the design and usage guidelines that come with Material Design to really make something good looking and functionally coherent with it.
Even from a purely philosophical perspective I have a great appreciation for material design. Even if it's not their intent, they're normalizing and standardizing art / design for non-artists and non-designers. Sounds like a pretty ambitious thing to me. I hope they succeed with it.
