It's deeper than yes/no for me because of course I was immediately jealous of those huge icons, at the superficial level. But at the same time IIRC the UI toolkit ergonomics also seemed to lag contemporary Windows by a bit in some ways. Could be wrong, as its been a while. (Was it that you could drag a Windows window and see full contents, not just the window outline, by that time? There were little differences like that which added up)

I felt the same about the hot new SGI machines that showed up at my university, and the Irix desktop which had its nice points but also some strange cons for a high end workstation, compared to Windows.

I eventually got the icons to my desktop via Dyne:Bolic and OpenStep, which was fun to explore. Wish I would've explored the API a bit.

But yeah, went with beautiful in the poll anyway. The default toolkit layouts do a really respectable job with white space (compare to Tk of the time) and the icon/tile gradients stay on the attractive side of the contrast issues that happened a lot with early icon design. It's still beautiful in that way for sure, if we are going with that word :D