Absolutely agree–not every team needs, or should have, a designer. In fact most won’t, especially if they are doing straight-up business apps. I think it IS important for devs to have expertise in designing user interaction, because you always need something that is usable. But I don’t think you need someone that has an eye for “pretty” GUIs.

My point was–if you ARE on a team that has a designer, don’t just let the designer gen up screen in Blend and then throw them over the fence. As a dev, you should start initial user interaction design WITHOUT your designer, and using both Blend and VStudio.

If you’re on a team without a designer, I think you should take the time to learn Blend–it’s not just about pretty, but also just a better XAML editor, plain and simple. That was sort of my epiphany with Blend–the perception is that it’s used only when you need to make stuff pretty. But as it turns out, it’s just much more productive for setting control properties than VStudio is, for WPF/Silverlight apps. I’d previously thought that you’d only go to Blend for doing “pretty” stuff like animations, but even just setting props on a Label, it just gives you more power. Seems sort of like having intellisense vs. not having it.

I think longer term, VStudio should definitely get some more attention to make it more powerful as a XAML editor and let it “catch up” to Blend. But for the moment, it seems a bit shortchanged–so Blend is worth looking at to improve your productivity.

As a separate issue, the pricing model should probably change. Blend should just “come in the box” with VStudio, rather than being a separate product that you pay for. But if you have an MSDN subscription, it’s a moot point, because even Blend 2 is now part of a regular MSDN subscription now, so it’s essentially free. (At least I got it w/my subscription, which I get through the Empower ISV program).

Not everything is a beauty contest.

There is a huge difference between usability and making everything look like a video game. I think you can teach developers usability and can reasonably expect that they can design half-way decent data entry screens.