Show codes.
When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).
No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.
The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.
Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.
Grrr.
I agree with you that Reveal Codes is a extremely helpful feature that is or should be standard on almost all current WordProcessing software. As someone who supports the 90% and 10% of WordPerfect Reveal Codes users, I can safely assume that this feature was not born out of innovation but necessity. I've been "fortunate" to support users using WordPerfect since WP8 and it is a notoriously buggy program that has trouble handling WP codes present in documents from older versions hence the birth of reveal codes. At best Reveal Codes is a great feature to find a bad code present in page 2 that crashes a document whenever you scroll past page 9 but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a "hack" created by the programmers that made it into production as a feature.
I can't "give" you passion. I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. and this isn't about Human Rights. Passion comes from within and if it's not there, I can't trigger you to release it. If all it required for passion was to saunter up to a counter and say "One passion, please" then we'd all be theoretical physicists musing over our all night analysis of LHC data whilst having tea with Stephen Hawking right now. Sorry to be so crass about it but all I can do is tell you what got the ball rolling inside of me to make computers do exactly what I bid them to and how that makes me feel at the end of the day. To tell you to go home and read Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug and then implement a Hidden Markov Model that learns on Bach Chorales in LISP is unlikely to do you any good. Me, on the other hand, that shit turned me from a hay bailing idiot farmhand into a programmer.
Since the submitter "used to enjoy writing code" then nothing has to be created from scratch. I honestly believe that you can get passion from other people(see Motivational Speakers). If you trully believed in something at one point in time then there is always someone or something that can reignite that passion if you look hard enough. I lost motivation to write code for awhile because I am surrounded by people who couldn't care less about computers in general. I find that listening to other passionate people really motivates me to do something and motivated friends stoke the fire of competition. I love watching Linus talk about topics he's passionate about because his energy is contagious (or obnoxious if you love cvs/svn/[insert linux scheduler here]). Ted Talks are good too.
My friends and I talk about starcraft WITH our lady friends. Why would someone be with a lady friend that can't talk to about their hobbies?
A girlfriend is more motivated to do things that a wife won't. I chose to fight for the status quo in "other areas of interest".
There are more people during StarCraft matches than in normal time. Just as there are more people during football matches than in normal time. How would that imply that StarCraft fans go to the bar less often than football fans?
From TFA:
But for sports-bar owners, "Starcraft" viewers represent a key new source of revenue from a demographic—self-described geeks—they hadn't attracted before.
My friends and I always talk Starcraft while at a bar (at the expense of our lady-friend's attention). Now we can do it under the banner of supporting local business.
It's the difference between having an established market and custom-building a market. When you're a small player (10% now, 0% at start) you can afford to take some chances and break away from established ways of doing things . You don't really have that option when you're a big player, not without alienating a significant portion of your customer base.
I doubt anyone can really argue that Steve Jobs really cares about alienating his customer base. He's designed the iProducts to function exactly how he would want them to be and openly states that you're holding it wrong. He's just lucky enough that millions of people are OK with doing things his way. Sheer dumb luck, not really. Out-innovating everyone else definitely. I find Apple products very restrictive but I am willing to concede that they only trail Google as the most innovative software company out there.
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds