This is the one of the areas a recording engineer's problems are different than a software engineer's intuition.
In software, we have a lot of problems that can ultimately be traced back to not having good "visibility" into the software or its state. This has various far-reaching consequences, from specialized tools to examine software (such as debuggers) to cultural values ("one job per component") that help us reason about complex systems we cannot see.
But in the case of audio, we have a multiple sensory organs to directly perceive sound. A bad audio engineer would be able to push a few buttons to move his headphones around in the signal chain and know in seconds where the EQ is occurring. A good one would simply know the U87 rolloff "by sound" and would not have to conduct any investigation at all.
There are some cases where more detailed analysis is done with fancy tools–mastering song recordings, for example. But in live sound, an audio engineer's primary concern is UX, because good UX is the difference between solving a problem quickly and annoying pops or worse. One button that engages a good EQ is much, much better than something like this: http://adn.harmanpro.com/product_attachments/product_attachm.... And epoxying the single button to the correct position is even better still!