>Lots of developers, when faced with a choice, make it configurable instead of thinking hard about it and making the choice.
It isn't an exclusive-or; if you want power users it needs to be configurable. What you need for beginners and casual users are really good defaults, which means doing the hard thinking to choose them. If you want both types of users, you need to do both types of work.
ADDED: It also helps to make the configuration choices discoverable, to provide a path for new users to become power users.
It isn't an exclusive-or; if you want power users it needs to be configurable. What you need for beginners and casual users are really good defaults, which means doing the hard thinking to choose them. If you want both types of users, you need to do both types of work.
ADDED: It also helps to make the configuration choices discoverable, to provide a path for new users to become power users.