>I think the real issue with GUIs: You have technical people building something (mostly) for non-technical people.
As a disgruntled power user, I think we have more of the exact opposite problem: the 'common denominator' users are driving interfare development toward oversimplicity. We have good software which continually undergoes translation into the GUI-equivalent of New-Speak. No please, I beg of you: don't spuritually reduce your program to some singular green [GO!] button! KDE 3.5 > 4+, GNOME 2 > 3+. Mozilla with a long habit of option removal (rivaled by GNOME project). If today's interface designers were in control 60 years ago, we would never have the Unix paradigm (it would be "too complicated" lol).
There should be a bit of elitism in this. Some things are hard to do, not all software should turn all hard things into 'easy', 'simplified', singular [GO!] buttons.
As a disgruntled power user, I think we have more of the exact opposite problem: the 'common denominator' users are driving interfare development toward oversimplicity. We have good software which continually undergoes translation into the GUI-equivalent of New-Speak. No please, I beg of you: don't spuritually reduce your program to some singular green [GO!] button! KDE 3.5 > 4+, GNOME 2 > 3+. Mozilla with a long habit of option removal (rivaled by GNOME project). If today's interface designers were in control 60 years ago, we would never have the Unix paradigm (it would be "too complicated" lol).
There should be a bit of elitism in this. Some things are hard to do, not all software should turn all hard things into 'easy', 'simplified', singular [GO!] buttons.