Perhaps most users need the fancy buttons, need the leading-users-by-the-nose-through-a-garden-of-visual-delights sort of experience that modern, beautiful, dumbed-down web UIs mostly provide.
The dense old interfaces the author champions are very rewarding and powerful for people who understand how to use them, but they're a huge turn-off for people who don't understand them and who aren't interested in investing the time needed to learn new tools.
Pretty much every web UI post-mortem you see finds the same thing: The more clicks you require of users to perform a function or use a feature, the less users engage with that function or feature. One click is often too much to ask.
Even so, the web as it stands today seems like (from a comp-sci point of view) a monumentally inefficient way of producing the functions it provides, with a ridiculous amount of hardware and software consumed by the problem of displaying, say, a news article which the reader has maybe a 5% chance of actually reading through and a 1% chance of commenting on.
The general public is (by our standards) astonishingly bad at using computers.
http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/people-really-really-suck-a...
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
Perhaps most users need the fancy buttons, need the leading-users-by-the-nose-through-a-garden-of-visual-delights sort of experience that modern, beautiful, dumbed-down web UIs mostly provide.
The dense old interfaces the author champions are very rewarding and powerful for people who understand how to use them, but they're a huge turn-off for people who don't understand them and who aren't interested in investing the time needed to learn new tools.
Pretty much every web UI post-mortem you see finds the same thing: The more clicks you require of users to perform a function or use a feature, the less users engage with that function or feature. One click is often too much to ask.
Even so, the web as it stands today seems like (from a comp-sci point of view) a monumentally inefficient way of producing the functions it provides, with a ridiculous amount of hardware and software consumed by the problem of displaying, say, a news article which the reader has maybe a 5% chance of actually reading through and a 1% chance of commenting on.