From the old DOS days, it has always seemed to 'dumb down' the software. Concentrating on NEW customers rather than the existing and 'experienced' customers.
I tend to think it's only that way if that's what you want to see.
For example, take command line vs. GUI. A lot of people complain about that. But if you had to go back to using nothing but a GUI, I'm positive you'd be very upset. We've gotten too used to WYSIWYG, drag-n-drop, multiple app windows, and more. Even people who still use a command line or text interface (such as vim) will often do THAT inside a window, and have multiple windows open simultaneously.
Now it's true that, sometimes, people design a GUI that's crap, and much harder to use than whatever it replaced. But that's usually because of the GUI design. A good example is some of the stuff inside of Civil 3D, where we have to setup these big tables of values, and the GUI is terrible, forcing us to click on cells one at a time, right-click and select "Create New Item" and then have to hunt through the entire table for the new item, and very terrible GUI design elements like that. But just because SOME people abuse GUIs, that doesn't mean that GUIs are bad.
And even for experienced users, it's nice when things get simpler. When the easy tasks get simpler, so do the more complex tasks, which might involve combining simple tasks in convoluted ways. As it becomes easier and faster to do more in a given application, the experienced users can use that better platform to do even fancier things. Sometimes it gets frustrating, because when they make a change, they sometimes break one of our fancy processes. But it's always a growing process, and while sometimes it seems we take two steps back for every step forward, we eventually are much further along than when we started.
At least, I feel that's another way of looking at all the same stuff.
