Perhaps. But more often than not it's an inherent complexity in the problem space itself. That isn't to say there is only ever one way of performing an action

Perhaps. But more often than not it's an inherent complexity in the problem space itself. That isn't to say there is only ever one way of performing an action or that it is impossible to make it clearer how to perform a task. And if you make it difficult for users to give you their opinion, it will be that much harder to know what needs to be improved. IRC is real-time and ephemeral, which makes it considerably more difficult to engage in conversations with contributors in other time zones, and refer back to design discussions that occurred 5-20 years ago. There's not very many projects that date back 20 years ago that also have the complexity that you're talking about. X11 and the Linux kernel are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. And I would hope that a 5-20 year old project that's continuously under development would have more documentation than posts from a mailing list about its design. I thought we already established that project communication channels are primarily optimized for the project contributors who use them daily, not for once-off questions from end users. I would be interested in seeing how many projects — open source in this case — have > 1 or 2 contributors. I may be off base, but I'd guess that you're optimizing towards large, highly visible projects and not the small, norm of an open source project.