I enjoyed reading through this because it gave me a chance to step back and look at all the things that people as users do and people as programmers implement everyday, without thinking of potential alternatives. It provides several scenarios which, at first glance, caused me to think, "Well, what's wrong with that?" but after presenting a few extremely reasonable questions or suggestions for improvement, I was left slightly stupid -- "Oh. That's why."

Its fairly important to keep things consistent or familiar for the people using current interfaces, though I would love to see some alternatives to aging methods being used in the very near future.

Unfortunately, I think getting people into something different may be quite tricky. Ripping out the Save option, for instance, would probably leave many people asking "How do I save? What's the filename?" Eliminating the File Open/Save dialog window would cause people to pluck their brains from Happy Paradigm A and force them into the New-But-Terribly-Uncomfortable Paradigm B. It will probably be a slow thing coming, if it comes at all.

When good interfaces go crufty