[panny]

>Pretty sure if there was a simple alternative, people would hate it.

>Everyone initially wants thing A. But then they want to customize it to do all permutations and combinations n of A, B, C.

Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that. Think about Eclipse vs IntelliJ. 10 years ago Eclipse had all the features, and IntelliJ didn't so it was fast. Most developers don't use all the features, so most developers were very happy to move to IntelliJ, even if it was not free. Then IntelliJ spent the next decade building lots of features it didn't have. Now everyone wants off of IntelliJ, because it's no longer fast. Now it's got a lot of "useless" features like Eclipse too.