I think the success of Arduino in the hardware world can be explained in a similar way, as the relative success of "command line app frameworks" like Click[1],

I think the success of Arduino in the hardware world can be explained in a similar way, as the relative success of "command line app frameworks" like Click[1], or even much lighter-weight libraries like argparse[2]. You absolutely can get away with using just getopt[3] (and people experienced with it will likely strongly prefer it). However certain factors such as a more declarative API, a nice logo, the existence of an ecosystem (even if you're not actively drawing from it), an official "branded" forum, etc can all play into picking a more complex solution, with more baggage you don't need, certain oddities that may throw users off, etc. [1]: https://click.palletsprojects.com/ https://click.palletsprojects.com/ [2]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html [3]: https://man.openbsd.org/getopt.3 https://man.openbsd.org/getopt.3, https://linux.die.net/man/3/getopt https://linux.die.net/man/3/getopt