Comment by klabb3

> That is because designers usually tend to push for "making stuff easy for users" by removing options

Yeah, although I think product managers are worse offenders. I think neither extreme is good. Customization is important but hard to get right, and creates rigidity and burdens for developers as well. One thing that engineers ignore, is the cost of mandatory customization or learning curves. Most users, even technical ones, may never get around to customizing so the defaults are more important than the full set of options. And engineers often underestimate the importance of sensible defaults. Google, for instance, had entire products that people didn't know about because they couldn't make users aware of them, despite them being free and good.

> "old school MS Office" was the perfect balance between "keep it easy enough for users to get started, with clear visual distinction to aid them"

I think that was an extremely cluttered UI, far more than saturation the attention of a new user. But otherwise I agree that hiding everything in menus or omitting features is not the solution either.