[barneybooroo]

In my experience, it's not so much that the power user has disappeared, but their power user "surface" has been squeezed. I work in an environment where I see journalists using clunky Windows-based CMSs with 30 years+ of baggage that I assumed would be killing productivity through their awkwardness.

They might all hate the tool, but are able to navigate between entering and editing copy, editing layouts and running orders, searching wires then adapting it into stories etc. with great speed with shortcuts, saved workflows and yes, awkward cludges like always-open text files of boolean searches they frequently re-use.

The minute they need to leave their tool to do a peripheral task though, all of those gains are lost. The new web-based video subtitling tool might be better than their old workflow and something they use several times a week but there's an instant assumption that it's a mouse-only task, even if the tool is a11y-aware enough to not be. Lots of "oh is it ready? Ok now I...think I click this bit" because things like communicating status and progress aren't consistent or ubiquitous. It just doesn't have the efficiencies of their ugly old thing.

On the one hand they could learn how they could automate their browser to actually integrate these tools with their workflows better, but nothing about the browser environment seems to give the impression to this class of user that it can be used in this way.

I don't know if that's just about tools that each have their own look and feel, or that the browser metaphor is too overloaded (because that feels like a very 2003-era concern :p)