alt Hacker NewsYou're spot on.
It's actually not really difficult (in theory) to engineer good UX, you simply have to look at the decision tree representing the application's state space and re-balance it according to actual usage intents.
Meaning, you make the most frequent goals need fewest clicks.
Clearly, practically nobody does that. Why?
IDK though - this is how Office ended up with its ribbon. They realised Paste was the most common action so they gave it a big button right at the left side, and then cut and copy got smaller buttons next to it. And similarly they reordered all the buttons according to frequency of action.
Result? When you have an intent in mind, it's hard to find the right button! In office 2003, you could click on the "insert" menu and every item there was something that would go into your document. If you're thinking "I want to add a picture" you can click on "insert" and scan through for picture-related items. (Blender does this too). In the 2007 ribbon model it would - well that one would probably be on the default visible ribbon because it's a frequent action - but what if you want to insert a table of contents? Who knows where that button is.