Yeah I was thinking about Photoshop and Lightroom, which I also use, as other examples of what OP said.
Photoshop is scriptable/extendable and Lightroom has the more intuitive GUI. Apple started the Lightroom paradigm with Aperture, which was kind of the GarageBand of photo editing softwares until Lightroom caught up with the ease of use.
CAD, rendering/animation, high end photo editing, and a lot of other higher end, professional software are script-able, provide libraries and APIs, and work closely with their end-users to give them what they want.