<i>&gt;We need to make people read manuals again</i><p>If you&#x27;ve ever read a technical manual, you&#x27;re probably in the 1% of the population. People don&#x27;t even read two-lines popups, and you expect them to read complicated manuals?<p>What you really need is adaptive interfaces that grow in complexity as requirements expand, reliably detecting the newbie &#x2F; power user &#x2F; hacker progression. That&#x27;s what works best. Hackers ridicule UIs that bury stuff under &quot;Advanced&quot; modes, but they&#x27;re actually the best approach.<p>Doing three (or four, or five) times the work, though, is no fun for developers, so we go from &quot;you&#x27;re a dumb user, be happy with limited options&quot; to &quot;you&#x27;re a clever user, surely you can read a 1000-pages bible before launching a command&quot;, because building multiple interfaces for the same routines is boring.