Another perspective from Kevin Fox, a former Senior UX Design Lead at Google:

Also please keep in mind that everyone has opinions on design, and that your UX professional has devoted years of their life to learning to separate their subjective opinions from their objective understanding about how the larger audience will interpret an interface. It’s not as demonstrable as code that passes unit-tests, but trust in it anyhow.

and to the users:

Google could easily increase their revenue in the short term with just a few poor decisions, but they don’t. This philosophy of ‘put the user first and the money will follow’ is so ingrained into the Google culture that many designers and engineers for whom this is their first corporate job don’t even realize that this is unusual, and that is awesome.

There are two sides to every story. Good to hear Fox’s.