This is a very important question to ask, but I am a little frustrated reading the paper. I went into reading the paper expecting answers to these questions :

This is a very important question to ask, but I am a little frustrated reading the paper. I went into reading the paper expecting answers to these questions : 1. How much is the problem of having too many configuration options mitigated by having sensible defaults ? "a significant percentage (up to 48.5%) of configuration issues are about users’ difficulties in finding or setting the parameters to obtain the intended system behavior; a significant percentage (up to 53.3%) of configuration errors are introduced due to users’ staying with default values incorrectly." The former means the configuration options provided do not match the ones desired by the user, not whether there was too many or too few. If anything it encourages software authors to provide more knobs. The latter doesn't have a strong enough correlation to the number of configuration parameters at all. For example, say all these errors happened at Google because of high load, and they were using Apache with default configuration which was built for small and medium scale websites. 2. How does having many configuration options affect software update process ? No idea 3. What percentage of users are unhappy due to having too many knobs ( decision fatigue, fear of missing out ) ? 17.3%∼48.5% of users calls to the technical support center and questions posted on forums. I assume this is a conservative estimate. 4. Does having too little knobs cause software to be forked and cause fragmentation ? No idea 5. Does the result differ when applied to application software ( vs system software ) ? Not in scope. Need more research.