tl;dr: Good tools should disappear into the background, but users often mistake the friction of working around a tool's shortcomings (like crafting vim macros or endlessly configuring Linux) for genuine productivity, conflating cleverness with output. This tribal attachment turns tool choice into identity, causing people to defend and even celebrate flaws rather than acknowledge them. The responsibility lies with toolmakers to ship sensible defaults rather than offloading decisions onto users under the guise of "configurability."