In my opinion, the easiest type of TODO list to manage and edit, is one stored in a text file, rather than having to go through GUIs to edit details or move things around, save backup versions, etc.

When I get some new task, I'll quickly add a new task entry to the top of my main todos text file. I'll either complete them quickly (and remove from the top of the text file), or later I'll organize things and integrate into my TODO wiki articles, which I keep organized into sections (in order of priority, by date, recurring, low priority, and randomly split some low priority things off into other articles). This part is necessary, because massive TODO.txt files get hard to manage, and wikis are much nicer to browse and read TODOs in, and keep things organized, even if they're harder to edit than a text file.

For major wiki TODO updates, I'll copy the article back into a text file, move parts around, edit, etc, and then save them back into the wiki. This also has the advantage that you can save your text file during extensive editing, rather than saving a lot of temporary versions in the wiki, or risking losing your work if the browser closes unexpectedly.

For coding projects, each has it's own TODO.txt file, rather than being stored on the wiki (the wiki would have more detail on overall tasks, if it's a complicated project). The project itself would be listed in the prioritized section on the TODOs wiki page (do some work on project foo). The projects themselves and their TODO.txt files, are managed via git revision control.

I've tried several different TODO and task-tracking systems in the past, and I've found them all to be much more complicated, or limited in various ways, compared to using a text editor to take down and manage tasks in a free-form way, combined with wikis for keeping larger task lists organized.

One interesting example of "dumbing down programming" is the RPGMaker series, particularly the VX and XP versions.

You can do basically all of your game eventing, scripting, resource editing, etc, a using user-friendly gui, no need to touch programming code. And you can do some fairly involved "eventing" logic, which is basically a very high level scripting language that you edit through user-friendly dialogue boxes.

But you can also start digging into the lower details. Actually, the core of the RPGMaker game engine is Ruby code, including an interpreter, which loads, interprets, etc the above resources. And that engine is very easy to extend, using custom Ruby coding. And in fact there is a huge number of custom scripts you can download from third parties to customize your games that way. Basically you can customize just about anything that way, except for the user-friendly editor that most people use.

Clearly we need a Shenanigans Handler