I think I phrased my comment wrong. I didn't mean to imply that what you actually see on the screen and how content is presented to you are unimportant. I meant aesthetically pleasing elements (like nice colors and brilliant animations) are less important components to "great" design than actually feeding content to users in the most intuitive way possible. Great designers are still very much needed to achieve the latter in my opinion.
I'm not a hater of designers :)