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Well, they are right, and you don't let devs decide about one, or else they will think customers would like atrocities like below.
The actual trick is that you don't throw tons of options at the customer because each choice has a COST in terms of effort.
That is what makes OSS UIs, designed by many cooks, so bad. Because nobody can agree on what and how, so as compromise, everything gets thrown in. The other sort of that bad UI is enterprise software, which is also design by comittee.
Instead, you design a workflow that should accomplish whatever the thing is meant to do as easily as possible. Customers don't care about a myriad of options, they want to DO shit with as little cost of time as possible.
Good design is as little as possible, but not less than what's necessary.
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@Fast-Nop while I agree what your example UI is horrid, the philosophy I was describing was not really specifically about UI. As an example, say that you like to store gizmos in a hierarchy. That makes the most sense to you and your users given your business's gizmos and gizmo lifecycles. The software you use to manage you gizmos comes out with a new version that removes the ability to store gizmos in a hierarchy because they thing hierarchies are not the proper way to store gizmos. At that point, if hierarchies are indeed the best way to store gizmos, I'd be looking for new software.
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@Fast-Nop One other important point I think you misunderstood. Maybe. There's no "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem here. It's that the supplier is taking choice and capabilities away from the customer when that's explicitely not what the customer wants.
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@monkeyboy The question is what customers don't like it. There will always be some who need any obscure feature. The problem is that the resulting featuritis to please them puts a cost on everyone else. Getting rid of them as customers is actually a net gain.
Now of course, if it's something that many customers or even most of them want, that's misjudging the market.
Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.
rant