Galeon, A History

many computer enthusiasts prefer usability to complexity

You are suggesting that they are mutually exclusive. They are not. There are a great many aplications out there that are complex as hell yet are very usable. Consider Nautilus - it is extremely complex, yet pretty usable for people who know little about Linux. Pan has a boatload of options, but I only set the ones that apply to me. Having a lot of preferences is not wrong. Having poorly documented or unintuitive options is. That is where I think you have been wrong all along. You have given the community this perception that simplicity is the only way. That's bad because it is an exclusionary policy and you piss off people who want the configurability. There is nothing wrong with a lot of well documented configuration options. That doesn't mean that the defaults cannot be sane. They should be. Hell, the "sane defaults" can even be targetted at end users who will never see the prefs dialog, but give power users and the like the option to change things. That is where people who have read your essay have gotten it wrong - they interpret it as "get rid of all but the necessary prefs". They should be doing "document all your options better and have sane defaults".

Later,

Erick