Productivity problem because of degrees of freedom.
Hard to do without graphics, and once you introduce graphics, you end up with endless non-productive futzing by non-graphics artists trying to be amateur graphics artists with move this one pixel over to get an artistic look or whatever other graphical effect. Unfortunately the user isn't a graphics artist and is theoretically hired to write code or memos or reviews, so they're both working way out of their core competency AND usually not any good at graphics arts. And if you don't allow hours of futzing, a competitor will, and you'll be destroyed in the marketplace. People like futzing even if its by definition totally anti-productive, which isn't all that weird given the popularity of the open plan office and so on.
Nothing is ever new in IT. In the early years of desktop publishing, productivity suffered dramatically because a simple memo meeting notice which took 10 minutes on typewriter and xerox, now took at least 3 hours of font selection (at least 6 different fonts and sizes per page) and endless clip art and at least 10 revisions to get it "just right".
Hard to do without graphics, and once you introduce graphics, you end up with endless non-productive futzing by non-graphics artists trying to be amateur graphics artists with move this one pixel over to get an artistic look or whatever other graphical effect. Unfortunately the user isn't a graphics artist and is theoretically hired to write code or memos or reviews, so they're both working way out of their core competency AND usually not any good at graphics arts. And if you don't allow hours of futzing, a competitor will, and you'll be destroyed in the marketplace. People like futzing even if its by definition totally anti-productive, which isn't all that weird given the popularity of the open plan office and so on.
Nothing is ever new in IT. In the early years of desktop publishing, productivity suffered dramatically because a simple memo meeting notice which took 10 minutes on typewriter and xerox, now took at least 3 hours of font selection (at least 6 different fonts and sizes per page) and endless clip art and at least 10 revisions to get it "just right".