One of the first things new computer users latch on to (including myself, long ago) is their graphical capabilities, and one of the first things budding geeks l

One of the first things new computer users latch on to (including myself, long ago) is their graphical capabilities, and one of the first things budding geeks learn - which was once even more true than now - is that there is a vast array of incompatible dedicated hardware and software used for them. This disincentivizes learning, as no one wants to spend a bunch of effort acquiring knowledge that is useless in the future. If everyone was using a similar 3D engine on similar hardware (or with the hardware abstracted away) for everything non-text, with comparable libraries, they could just jump in and start learning how to manipulate the graphical environment immediately as children, and build on those same methods anywhere they went for a lifetime. [The 2D stuff would obviously be a subset.] It would dramatically increase efficiency of all graphical development across the board. Also, it became apparent to me very early on that windowed GUI environments were inherently less productive and reliable for common tasks than "something like ncurses" as you say (the old AS/400 interfaces come to mind, a great many of which are still in use for good reason). The 2D GUI interface is much more finicky & time consuming to design properly, as well. In short, I couldn't agree more. One of the biggest frustrations I have with the entire field is how much time is wasted on counterproductive efforts. How many man-hours have been flushed away on 'perfectly aligning' graphical text boxes that never needed to be graphical in the first place? I understand how this is driven by underlying economic & social dynamics, but it's still galling.