As a developer and sysadmin: Let me know how that works for you. End users will rarely if ever recognize your contributions; will only really notice your contribution when it doesn't work.
Sorry.
> Sorry.
Typefaces, like other graphic elements, might not be felt to the point of the reader explicitly "recognizing" these contributions. Their impact is real albeit subtle. Designers are aware of that but still work really hard anyway.
If you have more resources and need to ask questions A/B testing doesn't handle well, you can also do it with good old-fashioned surveying. Take (say) a few hundred people sampled as representatively as possible from your target market. Randomly show half of them a version of the design that uses one typeface, and the other half a version that uses another. Ask them to rate how well they liked the design. See if there's a difference. Or ask them to recall things they saw, and see if there's a difference.
I received immediate, positive feedback on my initial contributions. Applying basic design to otherwise "undesigned" interfaces, made a big difference to our users.
While that may be an extreme example, it does highlight the need for design. Whether or not someone can "respect" it, as the OP suggests, is debatable. But, the effectiveness of something designed well, isn't.
When someone complains about how superfluous "design" is, I always assume they mean the latter definition. But I could be wrong.
IMHO, designers just don’t know when to stop.
As a developer, and maybe more relevant here, a user of software, it's kind of surprising how development efforts often continue well past the point of shipping something useful. Now, I'm not arguing that this applies to every software product, or that people should stop at the bare minimum like "welp, we shipped v1, let's pack it up everyone."
But this underlying belief that things must be continually improved is very pervasive in software and even moreso in open source. ("Last commit was 6 months ago? This project is obviously dead!")
I don't know that anything can or should be done to "fix" this, but it's an interesting observation. Think about it next time there's an "upgrade" that breaks something or changes a workflow you liked. Why did that happen?
Conversely, designers can not in isolation build a new product and thus are stuck (again, in my opinion) reinventing the wheel for what exists.
And yes, I agree with you that there is a lot of change for its own sake and I wish it would stop regardless of the source. See the recent UI overhaul of gmail. It was enough to force me to use their basic HTML UI and now I’m looking for an alternative all together.
However let me offer a counter anecdote: I love the BSD man pages. Do I think BSD is objectively better than other systems? That’s debatable. But I sure do appreciate the meticulous care with which the BSD manual is maintained. I don’t remember names off the top of my head but I always read the authors section of a BSD man page.
If you’re really seeking end user appreciation I’d suggest you try your hand in a relatively more creative context, like writing a user interface. The amount that people care matters enough that a program with fewer features, or that is less stable, or inferior on an “objective” technical level, but with a snazzier, more refined, UI will often be preferred to a technically superior one by users.