It'd just be so nice if there was any starting place for user defined or malleable systems. All these "software" driven systems seem cast in stone, lack flexib

It'd just be so nice if there was any starting place for user defined or malleable systems. All these "software" driven systems seem cast in stone, lack flexibility to let users do the right things for them, and so back back back the pendulum swings until eventually the hype train turns things back around again. Two points of reference come to mind. The well known-ish one, Steam and the Steam Deck. My gods, the flexibility steam has builtin for wiring up a controller to do whatever is godlike. I don't know how to speak even 1/4 justice to the powers here. It's the most flexible user facing software system on the planet, maybe short of Excel; there's so much capability on tap. I tried playing Jedi Academy recelty, an ancient game, and went & downloaded a bunch of shared profiles. On some of them there's like this gorgeous multimodal popover, press a button then swipe the joystick to pick a force power or weapon, which shows up in game as an overlay with actual graphic pictures someone baked in. The potential for man-machine symbiosis is parsecs afar of where most of the out-of-box(-is-all-you-get) unadjustable cloudware world has left us. The other data point that keeps resonating for me is an old consumer-oriented iot system, Webinos. There was a bunch of car interest, where exposing all the HVAC and lighting and even realtime radar proximity sensors. The whole system was a user-sovereign API system, where user's had control over where data went & could talk to their cars securely/remotely. The system was a general iot system, but it was neat to see car people leaning in, a decade ago. It never closed the loop though, and layered in programmability to the builtin infotainment system, which feels like what we need now. Its wild how we have all this software, but the interfaces are still all manufacturer provided. Most people don't, but on Android for example one can change their launcher which radically reshapes the whole experience. I think of that as a breeding ground, a permissive layer to sustain & keep staleness out with. Cars went all in on touchscreens, while caging users into very limited experiences. Ideally users would have hybrid flexibility, would be able to use some manufacturer presets that are touchscreen or physical centric (with both being available to some degree) and then to take the experience further. A static manufacturer defined system has to be simple & reliable first, and the modernization failed too many basic requirements (not remembering settings seems to be a big one in comments. Moved in to a new place recently with Lutron caseta everywhere & the dimmers have a little light showing brightness level... A "nice" affordances that an old old old dimmer switch had!). Not feeling at ends is what technology is failing to give us, and products keep suffering for our e-matter's severe lack of soft tweak ability; we keep taking the problem on in this sector or that & trying to find a balance, but the modern world lacks a software parallel of reconfigurability, is sort of pre-interchangeable-parts. The base of the pyramid to enable products constantly being unadaptable tech-nightmares is basically missing!