Sure — my point is that all of these things are just automating somebody’s idea of what steps users will have a hard time understanding, but users are different

Sure — my point is that all of these things are just automating somebody’s idea of what steps users will have a hard time understanding, but users are different, so any of these makeshift approaches will result in an article calling whatever steps are left “unintuitive”. Only the App Store comes close to “solving” this, by reducing it to a single “Get” button that is completely magical. Don’t forget the Installer message that asks if you want it to put the package in the Trash for you, and will automatically eject the disk image and put that in the Trash as well, without mentioning it. Yet another well-intentioned band-aid. (I actually find this “help” to be counter-intuitive because I do understand disk images, and I know read-only images can’t have a Trash, so how could this actually do what it’s saying?) BTW, speaking of hidden realities, remember the real reason apps have to be in ZIP files or disk images isn’t the compression (HTTP is likely already compressing it), it’s that Mac apps are, in reality, folders not files, so you can’t actually download them!