Sure, you can argue that learning to drive a standard isn't that hard, and if you want to do a valuable public service like delivering mail, then learning to drive one is a small price to pay. But it's a barrier to entry for most young drivers because automatic transmissions are far, far more common. Besides, not only is the constant starting/stopping like a mail truck does usually hardest part of driving a manual, but isn't even fundamentally coupled to the act of delivering mail.
There's plenty of competent drivers who might be willing to deliver mail using an automatic (or developers to maintain the kernel on a platform with a decent UX), and that kind of process overhead isn't something that should just be waved away.
Edit: Changed accidentally repeated phrasing in middle paragraph
The Post example doesn't work in Europe or Africa post.
Software doesn't have to be so difficult and tedious to use, as has been demonstrated by a decade of u/x in the UI space. Nowadays, nobody would ever consider gordian knot for their video editing, and I don't blame them.
This idea that one must suffer to learn is as outmoded as alchemy. You don't need to take the good with the bad; learn from the bad and make more of it good. I lived though the old times, and they sucked!
Nowadays, if the developer doesn't give any thought to u/x, people won't give any thought to his creation, and rightly so. The days of cryptic incantations and tedious rituals are largely over.
This type of assertion is made in a lot of contexts, but I don't believe it holds true. I believe that there are a subset of people who are willing to learn a new skill. Of those people, there are very few who are willing to learn a new skill but won't because of some perceived barrier to learning it. The vast majority of that subset will learn the new skill despite the perceived barrier.
Of the people who aren't in the set of people who are willing to learn a new skill, there will be very few people who will be movitated to learn the new skill because the perceived barrier to learning it has changed in some way.
Who gets into software as a profession, and then lets a bad UI turn them away from a project? When so much of the valuable skillset in programming is understanding and navigating a possibility space where the UI isn't built yet? (And I'm sure some kernel contributors would argue it's more _unusual_ than actively _worse_).
I know this paints me as old and out of touch. I know this. But I think it still applies. When I look at my interns, the good developers tend not to be the ones tripped up by onboarding to systems and workflows that aren't exactly like the trendy development tools or what they saw in school.