I think a big part of this is the disincentive to not follow a pattern of learned helplessness. Something I've anecdotally noticed in talking to older people wh

I think a big part of this is the disincentive to not follow a pattern of learned helplessness. Something I've anecdotally noticed in talking to older people who need to use computers for their jobs, but who are not technologists, is that they complain about user interfaces changing. If you run some old version of Windows or macOS in a VM with relevant versions of common office productivity software, you will see that the UIs are quite different now from 5, 10, 20, ... years ago. My perception is that people are sick of learning how to use some operating system, software version, whatever, only to have to re-learn everything because a new version of release. Especially considering that many professionals upgrade when their employer's IT department makes them, not on their own time. As a result, you get the attitude of "why bother learning how to use this when it's going to change out from under me in six months?". I'm not suggesting that the answer is to never change or improve any UI ever, but I don't think we've struck the right balance, at least in consumer-facing software. Consider that most of the people on HN have a very different experience. If you live in a UNIX environment, you can often use the same workflow/scripts for decades on end. If a new version of Bash or Vim came out that was backwards-incompatible, it would never be adopted, or would at least take many years to be.