Hm. Cater to the 1% who have shown that they're able to learn complex concepts easily, or support the 99% who would rather not think about internals and use a c

Hm. Cater to the 1% who have shown that they're able to learn complex concepts easily, or support the 99% who would rather not think about internals and use a computer as a simple tool. That's not a difficult question. The only time it makes sense to expose the internals is if you build a specialist tool for people who like internals exposed. This means that no, it shouldn't be "user configurable" either. You don't want a combinatorial explosion of states in your UI for a tiny set of users in the general purpose case, and you don't want to create a honking fat tool for specialists who'll only use the specialist path. The computer industry is discovering what the mechanical tools industry has known for a while: You can build a general purpose tool that's simple & straightforward, or you can make a specialist tool. Pretty much any specialist will be slightly unhappy with the specialist tool and modify it to their own requirements, but you can't build a specialist tool that makes even close to all specialists happy. The specialists will also continue to use the generalist tool if it gets the job done, but they'll complain every step of the way.