david weaver
The amish i ohio and PA (and I guess the mennonites, too) often take a basic design and round off all of the corners and soften the edges. If you ask them why, they will either say that it makes the furniture more comfortable or that they don't want kids running their eyes into corners of tables, etc.

I don't have much thought about the furniture makers who intentionally heavily round off absolutely everything, though. Transition lines in work generally aren't uncomfortable when the angle is very obtuse, and our eyes spend time looking for that kind of stuff, anyway - lines that define where things start and stop.

Same as the saw handles. There was a restorer who rounded off every single transition on saw handles they got under the guise that they (the transition lines) made the saw handles uncomfortable. I've never noticed them on an older saw handle, especially on one like the seaton handles -to suggest that they make a handle uncomfortable (given that they were on all of the old hand-made handles that would've been made any way a maker wanted to make them) sounds like a made-up reason to round off everything and sand the crap out of it just because it's easier.