This reminds me of 1998. I was in college and working at a mid sized business replacing a dumb terminal system on a VAX with a nice NT based GUI. I mocked the TUI. So antiquated running off a minicomputer.
We rolled out the PCs and updated software and salespeople’s and CSRs’ productivity was killed. They could fill in the screens on the old system before it finished painting.
The new one had the same “screens”, but flipping to the mouse and back was awful. A year later the vendor finally got everything straight with the keyboard (tab order, hot keys, etc). But it still took longer to render and blocked input and was generally awkward.
I set them up with telnet on their PCs back to the VAX. New folks found the GUI easier, but experienced users still hated it.
Eventually the vendor required moving the DB off the VAX and the TUI was dead.
I had started building web UIs by then. Thick clients were already becoming passé. But that experience really has stuck with me.
The tech you use doesn’t actually matter at all. Enabling people to work faster, better, easier is what matters.
Sometimes a short-term but steeper learning curve is better in the long run. Sometimes ease of adoption is more important. And sometimes the tech doesn’t change the fact that a tool just sucks.
Good tech becomes an extension of human ability. I love vim and awk. I’d rather write documents in troff or LaTeX w/ git. But I also love Pixelmator and actually even outlook these days. I feel awkward without them.
Interestingly, as I type this, I can’t think of a single web UI that I have that unconscious relationship with.