Complexity can't be the only answer (and there is evidence it can be tamed anyway). Over the past two decades developer culture and wider technological culture has conditioned regular people to be passive consumers of computing, rather than authors of it.
The fact that there are no compelling RADs for the major platforms -- especially ones that use intuitive metaphors -- speaks volumes. I have worked on many small freelance projects for the past few years and the issues most users have are all more or less the same: they need to organize some information in a way that is useful to them and to interact with it somehow. This might involve more remote fetching than it did in the 90s, but this isn't that much more complicated.
Imagining another way has become completely unfashionable, mostly because of marketing and the stated needs of business. We no longer apply the hands-off funding and timespans for the kinds of computing research that gave us personal computers in the first place.
Things are not the way they are because of some natural law.
The fact that there are no compelling RADs for the major platforms -- especially ones that use intuitive metaphors -- speaks volumes. I have worked on many small freelance projects for the past few years and the issues most users have are all more or less the same: they need to organize some information in a way that is useful to them and to interact with it somehow. This might involve more remote fetching than it did in the 90s, but this isn't that much more complicated.
Imagining another way has become completely unfashionable, mostly because of marketing and the stated needs of business. We no longer apply the hands-off funding and timespans for the kinds of computing research that gave us personal computers in the first place.
Things are not the way they are because of some natural law.