[nicoffeine]

> I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.

Because they need something to pad their resume. In fact, most of the things that are wrong with software today are for the same reason.

Executives want to make bold changes, so the Start button must be "re-imagined." For the same reason, Product Managers "re-imagine" the menus that have been in place for years and Product Designers "re-imagine" the design language to remove all cues that a button clicks and a panel scrolls.

In my routine trips to the auto parts stores over the past 20 years, I have seen their throughput drop as more and more of these modern ideas seeped in. Their text menus had been the same for decades, with as many options for a next action as there were keys on the keyboard. If my intuition is correct, they were remote sessions to a server/mainframe. How about that for keeping the computation close to the data. Now that has all been replaced with a single button and a cursor.

I'm not a die-hard CLI user by any stretch, but I understand the impulse after watching usability circle the drain year after year. There's a healthy middle somewhere and I am hoping to find it.