I think I can isolate the entire issue to this one line, emphasis mine:
> Only a small percentage (6.1%-16.7%) of configuration parameters are set by the majority of users; a significant percentage (up to 54.1%) of parameters are rarely set by any user.
The necessary question is, how many installations used at least one rarely-set parameter? Would those installations have happened without that parameter? How much effort went into developing that parameter, versus the profits of those installations?
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
The same idea applies to those advocating for having "simple" and "expert" configuration menus: everybody's expertise is different, and changes over time as we learn and forget things.
Plus there are power users and sheep. Sheep will follow power users, power users will expect extra features. No configurability means no power users means no sheep.
Right - just because I rarely change a parameter doesn't mean it's not important. In fact, some of the most important parameters are set once and then forgotten about.
Like, say, IFS in bash. Have you ever needed to set IFS? Do you know what it does? I've set it maybe 5 times and practically each one was to $'\n' so I can read newline-delimited input values in a while loop. But I appreciate the fact that I can set it to literally anything, if I ever need to.
This makes me think of a cached model of settings:
Most used can be configured in-app
Less used need to edit the config
Least used need to be set at build/install
> Only a small percentage (6.1%-16.7%) of configuration parameters are set by the majority of users; a significant percentage (up to 54.1%) of parameters are rarely set by any user.
The necessary question is, how many installations used at least one rarely-set parameter? Would those installations have happened without that parameter? How much effort went into developing that parameter, versus the profits of those installations?