with complex I think I meant "too intrincated to be worth spending your time with".
If anything is not worth spending your time with, then what can I say, just don't do it. But you surely mean something else. There are more causes that made you do things and you haven't spoken them yet.
afaik, that's what I meant. of course each one will decide if it's worth
it or not, but I'm giving a head's up beforehand.
Much of it is an excuse by people who already plenty of reasons to use
MAX over Pd, e.g. "my thesis director requires that I use MAX", "the programmer I trust best prefers MAX", "MAX is preinstalled at my university but Pd isn't, because the sysadmin claims that it's a security issue", or "I can't get any help from my classmates if I use Pd when they all use MAX" or "I saw the MAX advertisement and I tried looking for a Pd advertisement but couldn't find any" or the long list of more practical reasons that are posted on pd-list or #dataflow from time to time and
that I don't need to repeat here.The look of things does take some room in the reasons, but it tends to be overstated because it's more obvious, it's more on the surface, and it's more the first thing a user thought about.
considering that the person wants not to use only max, many of those
reasons above are environmental constraints decided outside, that the user
has no control about (if he says to the teacher or programmer to stop
using x and to use y instead, they'll most likely ignore him).
but if he is given the choice to use something else, if the empirical
aspects (gui, responsiveness, ...) help him go over the beginner stages,
instead of hindering him, it's much more productive. one example is
csound, the most powerful program for synthesis (I never used it in
realtime). many people who do electronics can't use it because they can't
cope with the programming.
considering we're speaking about the "normal person", that doesn't either
say "I want max" or "I want pd", but just wants a modern program that
allows him to work further. if someone for whatever reason says "I really
want pd", then even if some bugs were thrown in just for fun, he would
still work with it (like some people say "I want linux because it's free
and good for the world").
some enhancements were made in vvvv (kind of Pd but for visuals) - the
main developer said that he was inspired by pd, but he put in many things
that made the programming not so efficient - to know the output of an
object just put the mouse over the outlet and the number will show up
(instead of adding a nbox, then deleting it), object name completion, ...
(don't remember other examples). those are small details, but it helps for
the beginner to feel encouraged.