Unfortunately, I don't care how much of a pain something is for the designer. Remember, the designer wants me on the page, not the other way around. And I'd rather be able to have a sane website experience rather then a crappy one. Most of the examples you had were absolutely horrible to deal with, even though I'm not on a weird platform. Win7 with latest Chrome, and the mac one won't let me get past the second tick thingy. IMHO, I wish this fascination with "Oh, let's screw with the user experience cause we want to be special" would just disappear.
I strongly disagree. I like the variety and the experiments. When you try new things, some will work out, some won't, and which do and don't vary depending on who you ask.
I'm still sympathetic. There are certainly UI experiences I can't stand. Pages that throw things in my face on hover are my biggest pet peeve. You jump to a page, your mouse happens to land on top of some random thing. You don't click, but it doesn't matter, because it throws a blanket over what you're trying to see because you hovered over something you didn't want to see, and now you have to figure out how to somehow get rid of it.
It's a revolting experience that I see everywhere, but I seem to be the only one who notices that trying to move my mouse to something I DO want to click ends up stepping on a hover-mine, which covers what I was trying to click..., so it's not like I can get anyone else to complain. I feel your pain (even though I LIKE some of these scroll effects.)
But if we were to tell designers to "stop screwing with the user experience", we'd just as likely have every page throwing random things in your face as part of the "standard hover UI" as get rid of it.
We're better off in the end with lots of experiments, seeing what new ideas seem to work, and adding support for those into the evolving Web platform.
