Actually I don't find it arrogant at all. I currently just use PD from the audio side of things, but at my day job I'm a lead artist at a video game company, and you have actually hit on one of my biggest gripes about Photoshop, and the whole dumbing down of a product for the sake of readability/usability.
We are, thankfully, not programming Photoshop, and if anything GEM needs some 'smartening up'. Also, all of my comments, suggestions and actions on this subject have come directly from user requests. I would like to imagine that larger developers like Adobe are also basing the shape of their product on the needs of their users (but i really doubt this most of the time).
Photoshop (since version 3) introduced the idea of blend modes for its layers. Yet for some insane reason they decided to go against the most common naming schemes for these modes. So instead of 'Adding' one layer (CS
- CD) I need to figure out if I should use 'screen' or 'overlay' or some
other oddly named thing from their list (its screen by the way :). This has led to all types of confusion for artists, who started out as your 'dumb user' but over the years have moved into the power user category. So now They look at the various blend operations available to them on modern cards and have to run through them all testing each to see what its 'Photoshop' equivalent is.
Although your comments are probably better directed at Adobe, you might wish to know that the blend modes in Photoshop are based on the Apple QuickDraw CopyModes available to the CopyBits() routine. This is why you find similar functions in other applications like Macromedia Director as well.
In many cases Photoshop's approach is easier (multiply is easier, I guess, to understand than CS*CD) in the short term, aimed at people who are just looking to add text to their digital images. But in the long term 'dumbing' things down can hurt the long term user who wishes to expand their knowledge.
This whole 'dumb' vs 'power' user terminology has to stop, as it perpetuates a foolish and also counter-productive stereotype. When we use these polarizing terms, this mindset, often found at developers like Adobe, Quark and Digidesign, starts to take hold and eventually the developers end up with nothing but total contempt for their users, and the user's reciprocate the feeling. GEM is, hopefully, based on an idea of openness, which should lead to greater interaction between users and developers in order to mold the project into something that is useful and worthwhile to a community. There is no reason to limit the access to GEM to those that are of certain elite level (if not an elitist attitude as well), and I cannot see any way that this helps artists nor the community, apart from lightening the load for certain developers. Also, it should be pointed out that the user/developer distinction breaks down in an environment where anyone is free to create the tools they need. Building up these false divisions will only hurt the learning process in the end.
cgc