I think skeleton watches are becoming too flashy

Not alone. I picked up a skeleton a decade ago because it was subtle. Now I see stuff that looks like a wrist-mounted engine schematic. Some of it's fun, but it's not what drew me in.

Flashy sells. Skeletonizing is a flex, and Brands know it. You want subtle, buy a dress watch with a solid dial. Skeleton is inherently dramatic.

I don't mind flashy flashy if the finishing is real. The problem is when it's just cheap contrast paint and stamped bridges pretending to be haute horlogerie.

Hot take: skeleton watches were always a bit flashy. We just tolerated it because the mechanicals were interesting. Now the mechanicals are hidden behind 47 layers of tinted sapphire, and lume.

Lume on a skeleton is where I draw the line. What are you illuminating? The gap between the mainplate and the barrel bridge?

I actually like the busy look. My daily is a fully openworked chrono with skeleton hands and a skeleton date wheel. It's a mess and I love it. Different strokes.

The neo-skeleton trend is the same thing that happened to dive watches. Once everybody makes one, the only way to stand out is to go louder. It's a marketing spiral, not a design evolution.

I think it's cyclical. Give it five years and skeleton dials will be mostly monochrome again. Right now the pendulum is on the 'more is more' side.

Cyclical or not, I'm not buying a watch hoping it'll look tastefu in 2030. If I don't like it now, I don't like it now.

Fair. But 'tasteful' is doing a lot of work in this thread. Half the people complaining about flashy skeletons are the same ones who drool over gold-plated pocket watches from 1905 tbh.

That's different and you know it.

I'm not against drama, I'm against noise. There's a difference between a skeleton dial that guides your eye through the movement, and one that just throws everything at the crystal. The new stuff mostly does the latter.