Linux for the human chimp?

Lately I have become a full time dweller (ok, "addict" is the correct word) of Ubuntu brainstorm, the praiseworthy feedback website that lets Ubuntu users share their hints and points of view about what the operating system should be. I have already spent words of praise for this initiative in the past, and I am everyday more enthusiast of such involvment, but reading some brainstorm posts I have known an aspect of the linux crowd that I did not believe could exist and that at times scares me a bit. I'd call it the idiot-obsession (IdOb, from now on).

For what I can observe and infer from their posts, the typical traits of an IdOb user are the following:

- He is a tech-savy user, enough to understand at least in general the underlying problems of certain complex aspects of the system (such as network administration).

- He is not an hardcore Linux nutter (another archetypal type of Linux mental). The IdOb does acknowledge that some people might want to use Linux without understanding it all, just as they did with Windows and Mac, and they might be driven towards Linux for other reasons than the pure hacker spirit (all hail the hacker spirit, but this is not the point right now). Especially, he acknowledges the issues of a user migrating from Windows or Mac in front of the little shortcomings (often reclassified as "freedom features") of the Linux world.

- Most important of all, he thinks that the less computer-savy people will not be able to do anything if the programmers don't present it in the dumbest way possible. He is so concerned about foolproofness that he will likely sacrifice everything else (power, versatility, ultimately freedom). This goes well beyoind the most common command line phobia (actually I am all for graphic interfaces myself), it represents a general approach to the user experience which affects all the subsequent reasonings before actual choices even come into play.

The IdOb approach is in my opinion very dangerous because, under the cover of sometimes plausible reasonings, it misleads the whole point of Ubuntu as a distribution for "human beings"... which sort of involves the ability to reason and learn. I am seriously concerned that a too much "for dummies" approach to a variety of issues would waste the growing potential i see in this Linux distribution.
As far as I see it, having more graphical tools, having them organized better and more friendly is always a good point, and perhaps a priority (I have just recently tried to set up a network bridge and I just plain failed, so there is room for dummy-oriented improvement), but basing the whole process on the assumption that the user is dumb seems a bit excessive. After all it was Linus himself who said that if you give people a system for dummies you will just grow a generation of dummies (which is what happened, btw).
In my opinion, rather than preventing the user from tweaking something just because it is "too confusing for him" (read "give it up without even trying"), a correct approach should tend to develop better graphical interfaces showing all the options the user might have, and organizing them in a way that he can understand what he is doing, achieve his goal, and ultimately learn how it all worked. It is difficult, but it is the only healthy way I see to face the problem.

Is it easyer to just decide a priori what the user is capable of doing? Why not setting everything up in a transparent way so the user is unaware of anything and can sleep quiet (let us just hope that everything "just works" otherwise he is screwed)? If he does not even know that something exists it will not be tempted of tweaking or customizing it, won't he? Hell yes, it leads to a far more polished and neat result...
Wrong! If the user wanted that, he would buy a Mac, and he would be happy to pay for the privilege. Even Windows users who decide to swich to Linux generally do so because they are sick of an environment that treats them as drones until everything works fine just to abandon them altogether when the slightest issue arise. Either I am too optimist about mankind or IdObs fail to see this elementary truth... we shall wait and see.

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