Hm. I take your point, but I'm not sure the analogy works. Maybe better: "Old" (pick a date) cars had a manual transmission. Compared to automatic transmission

Hm. I take your point, but I'm not sure the analogy works. Maybe better: "Old" (pick a date) cars had a manual transmission. Compared to automatic transmissions, you might consider that user hostile. But back then no one knew what they were missing and got along just fine. Nowadays, some people still like manual transmissions! Not everyone, but some folks still buy them. Some even claim they're better than automatics! "They're cheaper, easier to maintain!" Are they user-hostile? I guess it depends on who the user is. (Airbags seem like a strict improvement, sure. But part of that comes from them not being part of the "interface" of the car -- we don't interact with them, we don't form preferences about them, gain familiarity with them, etc. Perhaps they correspond better to multi-cored CPUs, multithreading, or high-res color displays (features emacs has kept with the times on, more or less). It's much harder to come up with similar strict improvements in the UI world.)