The interface design example is classic Rationalism Verses Empiricism. The empiricist consults nature, iterating and testing until they have something that observably works. Speed of work, not depth of thought, is what matters. The classical rationalist doesn't bother, because they have so much faith in their models and deductive aparatus(in other words, a very very good imagination, mental or virtual) that they believe they can tell whether something will work just by looking hard at concepts while occupying the simulated mindsets of imaginary users. While I recognize that understanding user needs and perceptions from a distance is hard, I opine that the rationalist approach, on the right set of shoulders, is extremely valuable in interface design, there are local maxima you can't get past with A/B testing and user interviews.

You need to be thoughtful as all hell to do something new without ruining it in ten different ways. IMO Infinite scrolling is a good example. The design community has collectively decided that the idea is fundamentally broken for all sorts of reasons because none of them seem to be thoughtful enough to sit down and answer to each of the criticisms and see that every single one of them can be patched, instead of just looking at what has been done and making generalizations from how they did.

You cannot create truly new things without depth of thought, without a focused, accurate enough imagination to find the flaws before building one too many failed attempts and giving up.

[1] citation pending. I'll probably push out my black swan infinite scroll implementation at some point in the first or second quarter.