alt Hacker NewsI grokked display-buffer-alist and never had any problems since. With any other editor or IDE (and I used more than a few), it never occurred to me to even want to do anything complex with window placement. There are things I would love to see getting improved in Emacs, but managing windows and frames is not the one.
I think your perspective is perfectly valid, and I'd never advocate for dumbing down display-buffer-alist, but I do think some sort of package which makes common buffer configurations easy for novices who haven't put the effort in would make a big difference without getting in the way for those who've already grokked it