I think making a TUI or GUI is a huge pain, but having tried both I think writing a good enough TUI is easier. I suspect writing an actually good TUI is still easier than writing an actually good GUI, but I will caveat that with my lack of experience.
They are both not easy to make great, but with TUI you have way more constraints than with GUI so you can make something decent quickly and focus on important interaction and not on pixel-perfect button alignment.
Windows 98-XP GUIs were the best for such cases: there were clear design guidelines, everybody used native components, and GUI designers in IDEs were practical.
I think making a TUI or GUI is a huge pain, but having tried both I think writing a good enough TUI is easier. I suspect writing an actually good TUI is still easier than writing an actually good GUI, but I will caveat that with my lack of experience.
They are both not easy to make great, but with TUI you have way more constraints than with GUI so you can make something decent quickly and focus on important interaction and not on pixel-perfect button alignment.
Windows 98-XP GUIs were the best for such cases: there were clear design guidelines, everybody used native components, and GUI designers in IDEs were practical.