What about those people like me with Synesthesia? Seeing different colors on the screen that are different to what you are seeing when you hear music is very annoying. This is one of the reasons why I like Cubase, you can go into the preferences as disable all colors, then turn everything down to make everything pitch black. In saying this, the Cubase 6.5 mixer looked more classy in design and shapes but I like that the new Cubase can be completely blacked out and made darker than it comes as stock. I guess the solution would be allowing users to customise the mixer skin and colors more or less suited to what they want.
I think the Cubase mixer design will make more sense when/if they finally enable Mutitouch in Cubase for use on Mutitouch monitors. The new mixer is a million times better than the old mixer in functionality. I think you might be in a minority of not liking the new mixer, it was one of the most requested features a few years ago.