I don't think there needs to be any friction between "knobs" and "usable design"; in may ways the absence of knobs can be deeply user unfriendly as well. It's a

I don't think there needs to be any friction between "knobs" and "usable design"; in may ways the absence of knobs can be deeply user unfriendly as well. It's all about how well it's designed and explained. Not infrequently a settings page grows and grows until it becomes a chaotic mess, but that's not a problem of the knobs as such, but rather of the design of the settings page. Also, a lot of the times the inline documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps the best example of this are many games where the graphics settings are just a jumble of technical terms with no explanation or even indication what is faster.