I'm not sure it was ever meant to be intuitive or easy to use. As far as I can tell, INFO pages (and much of UNIX) was intended to be a stop-gap solution until something better and more permanent was written atop them. Unfortunately that dream was never realized, and Linux's accidental popularity standardized what was supposed to be a bunch of building blocks. I could be wrong though, but almost every utility in UNIX screams this to me.
INFO is a Richard Stallman thing, it's a GNU thing, it is emphatically NOT a Unix thing.
Stallman wanted to replace the Unix thing (which was always man pages) with INFO, and for many years deprecated man pages, which is part of why many GNU man pages are sub-par.
Not that non-GNU man pages are perfect, but still.
As for Unix being intended to be a stop-gap, your impression is simply historically incorrect, aside from philosophical issues like the claims made in the infamous Gabriel essay "Worse is Better".
> I could be wrong though, but almost every utility in UNIX screams this to me.
Unix/Linux is certainly not perfect, but this simply reflects the truth of Henry Spencer's aphorism, "Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
People who think Unix got it all wrong, as opposed to merely having assorted warts, should read Raymond's "Art of Unix Programming".
I was more than a little startled that Raymond captured a lot of the truth of the subject; it's a good read, and can potentially make anyone a better programmer.
I don't have the same understanding. Quite the opposite. GNU texinfo was designed (in 1986) to both generate manuals and be used as a hypertext system.
I know of nothing in its history to suggest that it was a stop-gap system.
Everything in UNIX is supposed to be building blocks, but you're supposed to be able to quickly assemble what you need from them in the shell. I don't think INFO fits this mold particularly well.
