The key quote from the OP is "Complexity is cumulative cognitive load".
From the point of view of an end-user, using Outlook is vastly simpler than learning to program in order to cobble together their own solution out of command-line tools with harsh learning curves. Even for a professional programmer the tradeoff is pretty clear.
People only have so much cognitive capacity and so much time to live. Every hour spent messing with configuration or customising behaviour has to be weighed against the lifetime gain of that improvement (let alone the lifetime cost of maintaining the custom solution as the environment changes).
That's not to say that I don't want software to be configurable and composable, just that the cost of doing so with our current tools is too high for most users.
I think a crucial clarification here is the distinction between simplicity of interface and simplicity of implementation, as pointed out in "The Rise of Worse is Better". The components of a Unix system may individually have simple implementations, but it adds up to a complex interface for the user.
Well said. That's the distinction that causes so much tension between programmers and users - it's why we have this rift between unixy software which is wonderfully composable but infuriating to use and windows/mac software which is easy to use on the common path but refuses to talk to anything else.
From the point of view of an end-user, using Outlook is vastly simpler than learning to program in order to cobble together their own solution out of command-line tools with harsh learning curves. Even for a professional programmer the tradeoff is pretty clear.
People only have so much cognitive capacity and so much time to live. Every hour spent messing with configuration or customising behaviour has to be weighed against the lifetime gain of that improvement (let alone the lifetime cost of maintaining the custom solution as the environment changes).
That's not to say that I don't want software to be configurable and composable, just that the cost of doing so with our current tools is too high for most users.