The golden ratio is easy to demystify for journos or non-designers observing the continuos wave of photoshopped crap trying to $ fit --force the spiral inside random images/works. But designers of school (industrial, architectural, engineering etc), know that it has been used for ages. It's there in the books, even in ancient books, period. And it is just another tool for achieving pleasant proportion and cadence.
Design has been prostituted lately, specially with the boom in the software industry, and seems like fitting the spiral in works that weren't built using the tool properly in the first place are destroying its real utility/credibility as design pattern. Fact is that fibonacci (as a mathematical pattern) is useful and can actually be found in several fields from the stock market [0] to physics [1][2]... so it's not just a "design thing".
Is it the "holy number" that many people praise in order to sell their designs? definitely not...
Is it useful as a design tool and could it be an unexplored and practical numerical constant? definitely yes...
Interesting that you give the example of the stock market, since Technical Analysis (which fibs are a part of) is often criticised for confirmation bias and lack of scientific proves of it working.
Pretty much parallel to how the golden ratio is criticised in the OP.
Design has been prostituted lately, specially with the boom in the software industry, and seems like fitting the spiral in works that weren't built using the tool properly in the first place are destroying its real utility/credibility as design pattern. Fact is that fibonacci (as a mathematical pattern) is useful and can actually be found in several fields from the stock market [0] to physics [1][2]... so it's not just a "design thing".
Is it the "holy number" that many people praise in order to sell their designs? definitely not...
Is it useful as a design tool and could it be an unexplored and practical numerical constant? definitely yes...
[0] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/technical/04/033104.asp
[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6904/uses-of-the-...
[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7287/full/464362a...