[betterunix2]

What is a "power user?" Sounds like the same nonsense we hear from proprietary software vendors all the time, "That feature is for enterprise users."

Gnome more or less optimizes for minimal configurability, the theory being that most users want the UI to be as clean as possible. They do not particularly care if someone would like to be able to change some annoying behavior, because they thought that behavior made sense and they feel the cost of adding a button to disable it, or even burying a configuration bit in gconf, is far too high. Of course, they do not have the resources needed to run actual user studies the way Apple, Google, and Microsoft do, so their idea of what users want is mostly based on their own ideas about what users want (since they usually dismiss feature requests from their actual users, because those are "power users").

[Miraste]

With apologies to Joseph Heller:

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own UI in the face of flaws that were real and immediate was the process of a power user. Orr was an average user and could be listened to. All he had to do was write a feature request; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be an average user and would have to be ignored."