Free software scares normal people

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

Yes. I think the crux of good interface design is coming up with a model that is simple and flexible enough to be understood by the user but also allow them to achieve their goals by composing operations and options, as opposed to special-casing each possible use-case. This allows you to address the needs of a large number of users without drowning in complexity, but it's really hard to come up with the right model and in general if there's something that will make you unpopular with your users it's changing around the UI after they've gotten used to it, so you don't really get to evolve this as the product develops.

(Commercial software is far from immune to this as well: professional tools like CAD are notoriously arcane and often have a huge number of special-purpose features, and they're not incentivised to improve their UI model because it would alienate their existing users, as well as not show up on the feature lists which are often used to drive purchasing decisions)