Yeah, me too. They were one of the steps on the pathway of enabling users and blurring the line between user and programmer. Sadly, the industry lost interest in personal computing in favor of turning users into a resource to farm and feed to advertisers.
Since it's more income to bill for rocket science than bicycle science, there's no incentive for many to simplify UI standards. Right now we are stuck with "rocket science" web-based UI's and JavaScript brain surgery.
Don't get me wrong, HTML browsers are fine for most documents and document navigation, but don't scale to real GUI's easily.
Since we're talking web and not native, your metaphor works only if your "rocket science" is performed with used swimming pool materials and your "brain surgery" with gardening tools.
