[TheOtherHobbes]

This is a classic example of blaming users for not being able to understand/remember/intuit a mess of wretchedly hostile design with no consistent logic or standardisation.

Vintage operating systems like TOPS-20 and VMS (up to a point) would go out of their way to be friendly and helpful. Conscious effort was put into this.

Unix shell commands seem to be the opposite - random feature accretion with deliberately obscure magic-spell UX.

What percentage of the population can define what "catenate" means without looking it up - never mind work out what "cat" abbreviates without being told?

How about left/right precedence and data flow? Why do some commands/operators have left precedence while others have right precedence? How about switch standardisation? Are the switches '--' or just '-' or maybe just a letter? Can you pipe subcommands to variables or not? [1]

And so on. Of course users don't immediately produce minimal solutions. Most users won't, most of the time.

[1] It depends on the shell. Mostly not reliably, because you often get different behaviour inside a terminal command and a shell script.