I wish we could just make people smarter instead of having to dumb everything down with handholding UX. Too bad that's impossible.
In general, people aren't dumb. They simply don't care to learn how to use your software and just want it to "do the damn thing". Also, your software probably isn't as easy to use as you think.
Well, 50% of people are dumber than average.
50% are dumber than the median. Confusing mean and median might be a telltale for which half of the population an individual belongs to :-)
I thought we had all agreed to pretend that intelligence is normally distributed? ;-)
”Average” can mean either.
UX isn't, or shouldn't, be about dumbing it down. It's about really understanding people's problems and making sure you are actually addressing them.
I don't see a contradiction between offering a task oriented "dumb" UI and surfacing a consistent model that allows people to get more powers if and when they need them. Good tools do both.
People are getting smarter as time goes on, so maybe we'll have good UX in a 100 years or something.