From LQWiki

unhappy story

Various parts of the Linux Environment need some help with the usabilty... Generally there are geeks who want to solve a particular problem, they quickly hack together a program that does what they want.. but it requires uber geek knowledge to use..

then when the product is shared to other uber geeks, they can't figure it out, but they don't want to have their uber geek status revoked, so they read tons of documentation, finally analizing the source code, and program behavior, using debug tools, and use the software... without complaining.. so they keep their uber geek status.

Then when a mere mortal geek comes along, and asks the uber geeks for advice, or help, because the documentation was not very good, he gets an RTFM type response... and goes to an inferior, or expensive computing environment.

Occasionally uber geeks like ESR reveal this little story to the public, and everybody goes *oh, yeah, that's what's happening* and then, sometimes, the software gets made usable...

there is hope

Many people really get a kick out of writing highly usable software. It's not actually that hard, for the basic stuff.. but some things are non-trivial.
 See: non-trivial usability and trivial usability for lists of requested enhancements.

The non trivial enhancements are things that require hard work, like implementing zoom exactly perfectly, compiling a database of every printer known to man, and orchestrating the collection of said info.

Trivial enhancements are things that just need to be disabled, or an extra hyperlink at the top of a page, or condensing the super ugly needlessly wordy documentation of some linux distributions.