+1 on the low contrast comment. It's all the rage nowadays, but this one of those trends that I think people will look back on in a few years and say, "How did anyone ever think that was a good idea?"
lower contrast is not bad, I don't want all text to be #000 and #fff, but the contrast on DuckDuckGo is too low.
As it says here your text should be as readable as #333 on #fff:
http://ia.net/blog/100e2r/
Most sensible people see that it's a bad idea, and they can see this today (if not yesterday). This isn't the kind of thing that requires hindsight to see that it's a bad idea through and through.
If anything should be questioned in hindsight, it should be why so many managers and executives allowed designers to seriously submit such bad ideas for consideration, never mind allowing such unusable designs to actually be implemented.
