The project wasn't perfectionistic, I specifically designed it to be as easy to add and look at what I was spending as possible. Instead of putting spending into accounts, I used simple categories. I had a dashboard view that gave me exactly the window into my finances I was looking for.

It was good enough for my purposes. But I kept running into situations that called for extended customization. Sure I could have extended the app to account for temporary changes in how I wanted to do things. But it just kinda stopped making sense after awhile. It made me look into how I managed my finances before I ever did accounting more closely.

What I found was that I never really got into the sort of mindless spending habits that kill most people. Accounting was, in essence, a unnecessary addition to an app that was already working just fine. It didn't buy me much when I was doing it, and I didn't miss it when it went away. My life just isn't that complicated.

Similarly, I've never needed productivity software other than, on very rare occasions when I'm super busy, a pad of paper and a pen. And I was a GTD zealot 8 years ago.

My advice in my original comment was tailored towards people who plan on being upwardly mobile. If that's what you want to do, then personal finance is a waste of time. Ramit Sethi's advice is the best, chase big wins, automate your finances, and don't stress out over small repeated expenses.

If you've hit a career plateau and don't see yourself making more money anytime soon, then by all means make the most of what you have. But c'mon, this is Hacker News. We can all be upwardly mobile here if we want to be.

The foundation isn't the issue. You can write an intuitive interface around a double-entry accounting system, but you must keep to the fundamentals of money flowing through the system.