Clever but not simple? I have a hard time believing that people want to sacrifice simplicity for cleverness. But I see your point about people preferring a CLI than a web portal. I guess simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. What's simple for me, can often be wizardry for my dad.
At the risk of facing the wrath of developers, they also choose products that are not are not necessarily clever, but makes them clever. e.g: IaaS Vs PaaS, C++ Vs Visual Basic etc.
Developers usually say that abstraction doesn't give them enough control/flexibility. That might be true in some cases. But in most cases, they are afraid that abstraction will make them dumb, instead of making them clever.
