I used the smit system and the stuff which came with HP 9000's both were
more difficult to use than handomatic methods. When Solaris was being
ramped up we often got very good (unofficial) texts from Sun support
which appeared to indicate that doing it the old way was often the
easiest.
Joe User often is as baffled by the terminology as anything else & a
poorly designed GUI control panel won't help. I'm no fan of Billy, but
Win 95 is nearly there. The distressing thing is that we're all
completely in the dark about what the installed stuff is actually
doing/for etc. My Win 95 system is almost full now and I'm almost afraid
to remove junk because it's difficult to be sure what's needed. I keep
my Linux system well pruned (by hand), but only because I'm fairly sure
what various libs/executables are for.
The 90-10 rule probably applies eg 90% of all the problems can be easily
handled ok by an automatic system the other 10% will require 90% of the
effort to automate & some few will prove impossible except for the Win95
take it or leave it approach.
-- Robin Becker