You'd think that a company with as much money as MS has to blow on stupid stuff that no one asked for like the navigation pain (sic) might include a few old people in their testing team. Yep, 15 years later and I still think the nav pain sucks. A dozen times a day it annoys me as I have to scroll up in a long list to shrink it or use 4 keystrokes (or more) to do something that could be done with 1 in the db window. One change to the database window would have made it fabulous (ability to search all item lists at once.)
I use the black theme (which is absolutely ugly and I hate it) because there is insufficient contrast between the text and the background on the other themes.
When the text is tiny, as it is in the ribbon and properties dialogs, the contrast MUST be more pronounced but apparently, people on the usability team don't know that.