[aflag]

I don't think good tools are necessarily easy to approach. Some of the best tools I know have quite a steep learning curve. A good tool is one that gives you power. It makes difficult and complicated tasks easy and simple. It may come with the cost of getting good with using the tool, but once you master it, you don't know how you lived without it.

[dejj]

Consider “affordances”: a chair may be used for sitting, or as a weapon, or as kindling etc. Likewise, a good tool is made to be approachable for the beginner, and open-endedly extensible for the expert. They’re the same material, but the hand movements of beginner and expert are very different. Analogously, consider how Simpsons episodes have 2 affordances: to be funny for children and for adults, each for their own reasons.

[runevault]

A good tool picks an audience and builds everything with them in mind. You can make a tool aimed at beginners of some discipline with the understanding it may not satisfy power users, but that doesn't make it a bad one, just bad for that audience. Same in the other direction, tools aimed at optimizing power users ability to do their task may seem completely impossible to a beginner, and that's totally okay.

[Kinrany]

Audiences change over time. Projects need something less ephemeral to aim for.

[typeofnandev]

There's a lot of truth to this. I feel like I'm willing to really dig in and learn a tool if I can sense that the power of wielding that tool will be commensurate with the difficulty learning it.

[pessimizer]

A good tool is one that works, and works predictably. If it can just stay reasonably dependable, I'll come up with ways to use it to its limits.