> I believe there is a middle ground: focusing on mechanism, but providing a sane default policy that lets the user get stuff done fast and change things later

> I believe there is a middle ground: focusing on mechanism, but providing a sane default policy that lets the user get stuff done fast and change things later if they need to. I agree with this. I see parallels to a lot of frameworks, languages, libraries, etc: the "getting started" guide is fairly simple, but then to do a "real" thing with it, you need to basically throw all that away and learn a whole different system. The other mistake a lot of systems make is abstracting away the complexity with defaults (aka "magic"), but making it so if you do want to change one thing you have to learn and re-implement the entire configuration yourself. In both cases, it's the learning curve that is important to think about: going from usable defaults (beginner) to customization (expert) should not be one giant all-or-nothing step.