TODO: Upgrade this from brain-dump to polished article

To expand: When building a system (in this case a piece of software), we should make it as easy as possible for novices to make changes to that system, because 1. Democratization and accessibility are generally positive forces, and 2. To combat Over-complexification.

Accessibility

Why

Reduces the cost of

Increases opportunity and the distribution of that opportunity

Combating Over Complexification

Over-complexification is what happens when a group (or industry) transitions from focusing on a set of problems, experienced by their customers, to focusing on a set of solutions, administered by them, the experts. This happens everywhere but is more legible in certain places, such as the legal profession. It's rarely spoken about in the web profession, but (in my opinion) it's definitely there.

As an industry grows, so too does the authority of the "experts" that oversee it, and it becomes very easy to say "we should adopt this behaviour, ritual or set of tooling, because it is better", without being asked "better for whom?". Neither the customers or the non-experts are in a position to validate those claims - how can you critique a system you don't understand?

And so the over-complexification continues, incrementally, over time.

This is good for the experts, because the cost of the service they provide increases with each incremental level of complexity. But it's bad for everyone else - for novices because they can't easily provide value early in their career or learning journey, and for end users because they have to pay a premium for people who understand the system.

Aside: The novice-intermediate-expert journey is fascinating. It starts with "Why is this so complicated?" when beginning the learning process, but because it takes so long to become an expert, by the time you get there you've convinced yourself the complexity is necessary, and you start to convince others it's necessary too, because otherwise you'd have spent such an enormous amount of time and effort on it.

The late Dan Kaminsky said it best: