> "inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" > Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs That's a character

> "inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" > Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs That's a characteristic of hundreds of developers creating features over dozens of years, and those features interacting with each other in subtle ways. In my experience, even in small projects and codebases things get notoriously inconsistent very fast. It's a hard thing to keep, as it requires conscious effort and most developers don't care that much. And once something goes to production (or far enough in non-regression phase), it's a game over. On top of that, AFAIU, in legacy systems, storage space was severely limited. Hence PNRs had a rigid structure that was not very extensible. That's another fact due to which implementing new features in a backward-compatible way might have been cumbersome.