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Security-critical software is best when it's obvious how to use it, and how not to, which is easier with a focused tool. I feel like GPG has so many features that it's hard to look things up in a manual, or to make use of shell tab-completion, or to get a clear mental picture of its possible failure modes.

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It's sort of obviously true that when something makes it harder to make mistakes, it's safer. But there's only so much a tool can do. It's not hard to use if you understand asymmetric cryptography, but if you don't, it's asymptotic to impossible. The model itself is pretty hard.

That's very true. Asymmetric cryptography is a lot less intuitive, and it's hard to come up with a decent GUI for that kind of functionality. Keybase and keys.pub have probably done the best job.

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