I agree that time will tell if they were able to clean the ship succesfully. But all the complaining about how radical the changes are for powerusers at least suggest they are honestly trying for once.

I like the curve analogy. It seems to suggest that good UI is like a partial ordering of usecases, where there is a clear relationship between complexity, position on the learning curve and popularity of the usecase.

From that perspective one might say the traditional windows desktop starts off its learning curve with too much complexity and puts system maintainance tasks too far down on the curve.