Maybe I'm weird, but I feel like that style of GUI design with OS 8 and 9 were the pinnacle of GUI styling. Well, maybe BeOS deserves mention as well. But you could put young children in front of a Mac at school, and they'd figure out how to do everything they needed to do without much help and with no distraction.

Yes there are a few tweaks to make -- I worked in 'passes' in the code, and my last 'pass' at the menus was a little while ago, normally I go and fix the little nags as I go along.

Last (big) pass was the text editor, which isn't totally finished and polished but I had to release something for the deadline ;-)

I found it fascinating that my brain readily accepts this as macOS Classic UI, even though, as you say, it's a kind of System 7++ - a neat trick to have pulled off. Then after a bit it starts nitpicking on alignment and spacing unasked, like some weird Apple Cult Manchurian Candidate.

The unaligned popup selectors scared me too... hope it won't be added to "get off my lawn"-faq ;)