I literally had this discussion today at work. And then couple of weeks ago, when I suggested we drop a bunch of chartjunk on our products' graphs. And then some time earlier too.

Tufte talks about minimizing "chartjunk", maximizing "data ink", and being comfortable with high information density. Charts are tools, and while they may sometimes require some amount of effort to understand, they play to humans' strengths like scanning and pattern matching. I think Tufte got this very right, and it generalizes well to user interfaces.

Came here to plug for Tufte.

"What’s the lesson here?", asks the article. It seems to me the lesson is don't hire UX designers that are ignorant of basic seminal work in UX.