I don't think I'm missing the forest for the trees, I'm just complaining about preferences presented as absolutes. It's absolutely true that "more knobs" is of

I don't think I'm missing the forest for the trees, I'm just complaining about preferences presented as absolutes. It's absolutely true that "more knobs" is often evidence of laziness, or bad design, or sloppy thinking. Many (most?) programs should have fewer knobs than they do, and should elevate a few of their knobs while burying the rest. Knobs are distracting and confusing even for power users, and there's a lot to be said for putting 90% of the content behind a big red button reading "ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT WHAT YOU WANT". I primarily objected to two things here: One is the failure to differentiate general-use software from poweruser software; Photoshop and its ilk are hard to use, but their feature-rich approach is what makes them employment-worthy skills. Glibly applying usage statistics to Photo Viewer and Photoshop equally feels like a category error to me. The other is bad statistics. "many features are used by <2% of users", well great. But that isn't grounds for hiding/removing them unless it's the same set of users! Most of the data gathered in this article overlooks questions like "will you break 2% of workflows, or 90%?" and "among rarely-used features, how many are one-time preference settings?" I don't mean to imply that most software is good, we all know better than that. Fewer knobs should be a goal, when all too often more knobs is a goal. But that doesn't mean I'm especially impressed with this treatment of it.