My gripe with this edict is that it is not as relevant in the age of dashboards and interactive data. The same reason they were often a bad choice in static views, can be a positive within an interactive dashboard - a busy pie chart indicate visually that selection filters are not granular enough for the design criteria of the view.

Personal opinion: I tend to find that the times when I end up using advanced Powershell features, I should have been writing code; and times when I don't I could easily have used a batch file.

It's too bad that the focus wasn't put on creating an amazing .net interpreter for the commandline.

An animated icon only makes sense when it represents the progress of a 'long running' command, such as reload or send. In this case it affords recognition that something is happening. Anywhere else this is a terrible ui decision.