[hderms]

It's not that the commandline is necessarily underpowered, imo, it's that the discoverability and intuitiveness of the *nix userland is pretty low. Man pages are a great way to document every flag a program accepts, but are a terrible way for someone to figure out some simple use case for the program. Similarly, flags are named without any regard for intuitiveness (-l is liable to mean different things for any program you encounter, and the precise meanings one program decided on can be hard to remember because there is no explicit commonality with any other tool).

In that sense, it absolutely is a user hostile design and it involves lots of unnecessary memorization.

[Kalium]

It's unintuitive if you come from Window-GUI-land. It's plenty intuitive that should consult the manual within UNIX-land.

Remember, intuition is not some inborn instinct. It's a product of training. To a user of MULTICS, iOS is wildly unintuitive.

[jerf]

Yes, by no means consider my post a defense of every quirky detail of history. My point is more that one must start by correctly identifying the problems before one could hope to solve the problems, and "lack of power" is definitely not it.