[notpachet]

I agree that systems should be rewarding to the user. But there are rewards and there are rewards. There are short-term dopamine fix rewards, and then there are the rewards that you can only really appreciate after having invested some time and energy first. It's like fast food vs a lifetime of diet and exercise.

The churn in the frontend ecosystem reminds me a lot of fad dieting: people have never really experienced working in a paradigm that enables them to stay healthy through regular diet and exercise over the long term, so they turn to the latest shiny gizmo hoping that this time it will be different.

[whakim]

I agree with you that there's a balance to be had here (although I will note that there's a pretty big difference in physiological effect between tens of thousands of years of evolutionary history and a few years of writing code). That being said, I don't think we should make "rewarding to the user" a second-class citizen to "technical quality" - I think it's an important component of good technical quality that something is pleasurable to use. My impression is that a lot of self-serious systems designers don't embrace this view because it's easier to blame the technical incompetence of their users.