[atoav]

I agree that they did the right thing for the domain of the TLI, as your comment captured.

And existing editing GUIs might very well be a local maxima — however we designers need to be careful in quickly condemning existing solutions that we don't understand by calling them "unfocused", "slow" or "ugly".

It is the responsibility of any designer to be more aware than the rest of tradeoffs like these — making it look good is merely a nice to have you can achieve as well. To decide that for a domain as complex as editing demands at least some degree of awareness of the common problems an editor needs to solve, as your software or UI will have to solve them as well.

Sometimes this comes with a learning curve, as your user will have to learn how to tell the computer what they want. They will have to learn some language that allows them to express this, if they don't want the computer to take the wheel and just assume what they want. And that very language is what makes it complex and hard to learn, and there is not much way around it. Might there be a different language that lets you express more things with better ease while beeing easier to learn? Sure. But will it still be harder to learn a language which allows you to express a lot, compared to a language which allows you to express only little? Yes - as well.

That beeing said: I they made all the right usability choices on their own thing there, my comment was more an aside stemming from my own values as a designer.