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At least when I was studying (and later teaching) human-computer interaction years ago it was a bit more complex than this post makes it out to be.

A setting might have been added because the creator legitimately couldn't make up their mind about a feature. Or because end-users have divergent use-cases, preferences, abilities, situations, or hardware. Or because the creator felt that the only way to support two different use-cases was to make two different interfaces with a settings toggle.

Each setting has an incremental cost in terms of development, testing, maintenance, documentation, initial onboarding, finding other settings, etc. The best response is to consider whether each setting is sufficiently valuable, and whether there are any settings that can be eliminated with better defaults or more flexible interfaces.

Because many people don't have time to do that, products typically end up at one of two extremes. Either they have no settings beyond the ones the creator themselves uses, or they are the union of every setting anyone has ever asked for.



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