[Dvorac]

When only looking at the images in the post above, the image on the right is instantly recognizable as Metro UI. The image on the left however is not. I doubt many people are familiar with early concept versions and why should they? They were rejected for a reason.

I stand by my opinion that alternate designs should be left, well, "alternate" and the final design should be the main goal. Leave the early concepts for alternate themes or mods.

I completely understand what you are afraid of but I believe that by reworking through the design process that was once performed by Microsoft we can see as to why some decisions were made. It may be that some of the basic design principles were discarded simply because of screen size or it could be that it added nothing to usability, but it is up to us to find out. In other words, strict adherence to design principles established for a phone will create usability problems on a large screen.

In my opinion c2 (concept 2) introduces some unique ideas that should be considered for the final revision, and at a point this early in the design process all I am worried about is ideas.