It's a little depressing that after all of the work the industry has put into graphical interfaces and making software easy to use, the mark has been so widely

It's a little depressing that after all of the work the industry has put into graphical interfaces and making software easy to use, the mark has been so widely missed. It seems to me that a big part of this post boils down to people frustrated (in some cases literally to tears) at their inability to make the machine do the thing they need done. I don't have a solution, but I think we have two big problems: the rigidity of the GUI (it's difficult to combine operations, in some cases impossible) and then arbitrary gatekeeping of features for dollars (why can't the free Acrobat export PNG files?). For every tool like Excel, we have another "simple" tool that is nearly only one possible workflow.