They were aiming for minimalism, they thought a white minimalist dial would look cool.

Do I like it? No. Quite apart from anything else, I find minute markers useful so there's no way I'd be buying one of these myself on that ground alone.

The underlying problem demonstrated by a number of rubbish designs in recent years (and I do think the astonishingly atrocious skull-and-crossbones model is the worst of the lot) is that whoever is making the design decisions just doesn't have very good taste. It's as Sinnlover said, you'd think they'd appointed a child to the role.