I guess I really don't get the point of your post. I thought it was basically a "well, everyone who doesn't think and act like me is wrong!" Slashdot Special, but after re-reading it I'm not so sure.

Well, chalk one up for your intuition and mark me down with a loss for communication. :-)

I suppose I feel a bit confused as to why there seem to be so many people who, when coming into contact with NeXT technologies, have such a visceral dislike of them; while at the same time there is a smaller number for whom it not only seems comfortable, but demonstrably much more productive. There used to be a similar phenomenon with Blender, I think. I'm not really a 3D modeller/animator, so the discussions were always peripheral for me. But I seem to recall people who had worked with 3DS Max and some other professional 3D tools being blown away by how productive Blender made them, once they got past the unusual GUI layout. At the same time, there were a lot of other people who tried it once, said something along the lines of "I don't like this because it's too different," and walked away. Is it just that they didn't take the time to learn how to be effective with the tool? Or is there really some difference in cognitive psychology that makes certain tools more natural to certain people? (You could say, "why not just change the GUI to be more traditional, then?" The problem, I would presume, was that the "unusual" GUI was one of the keys to the increased productivity.)

I have been injured physically by common, but ergonomically poor, equipment designs. Yet when I was shown equipment that is more appropriate for the human body, I disliked it because it felt different from what I was familiar with. Fortunately, I eventually came around and now feel much better because I stuck with it long enough. But "cognitive ergonomics," if there is such a thing, may be different from physical ergonomics.