As they say, "All generalizations are false". Anyone can come up with anecdotes supporting either side of this argument, and as usual they are all right. Some

As they say, "All generalizations are false". Anyone can come up with anecdotes supporting either side of this argument, and as usual they are all right. Some options are the results of indecisive developers, who would be doing the user a favor if they did away with some options, but others add value. You touch on one of the unstated assumptions here: some applications have more homogeneous user pools than others. The more diverse a user pool an application needs to support, the more flexible it needs to be to satisfy those users. Some users need feature X; others never use feature X and find it distracting, and would like to use the screen space for something else. Are they wrong? Maybe, probably not, but it depends on the specifics of the case and not on platitudes about having vision.