You're ignoring the "cognitive load" and "attention requirements" of the mythical "correct and efficient" interface. Sometimes I want to use 99.999% of my brain

You're ignoring the "cognitive load" and "attention requirements" of the mythical "correct and efficient" interface. Sometimes I want to use 99.999% of my brain for something else and I want to mindlessly use that microwave with the 0.0001% left. My desired thought process is "woo, woo, monkey-wuga, up-turny-power, down-turny-time, woo, woop, warmy my banana woop, woop!" or something simpler than that. And I also don't use it in a regular/predictable pattern, so auto-pressing one button for one of the "regular" time intervals might be useless for me since what I do is always irregular and sometimes irrational ("hmm, I wanna see some fireworks to light up my mood, let's microwave my colleague's USB stick labeled "bitcoins" for the lulz!"). The problem is not designing for sellability. Is not acknowledging that (1) some people don't want to RTFM! and (2) other people are OK with RTFM but want serious efficiency and correctness gains for it, "I pain, now you gimme gain!". So you figure out who your users are and design for your users. Now, the absolute worst is the parent article's example, where someone managed to "design for no possible user" by both forcing people to RTFM and providing zero efficiency and correctness benefits in return. But designing for the wrong user is also bad.