Just been reading Rory's post, titled Python-O-Rama, and it got me thinking about choice. It's not always a good thing.
I won't repeat what I wrote in the comments there, but the basic point of my argument was that choice is not good when all you're doing is offloading the decision-making process to the end-user. Now, there's plenty of examples of this out there, and open-source software is not the only culprit (in fact, I mentioned WinZip in my comments, which isn't open-source) but it seems to me that OSS seems to have the mentality that choice (even just for the sake of choice) is always better than no choice.
I think, as developers, it can sometimes be difficult for us to take on the role of a proper designer and make a few executive decisions, because we seem incapable agreeing on some of the most unimportant details of our own work - like whether or not to use hungarian notation, whether or not Java/C#/whatever is better than C/C++/whatever else, or even whether the curly-brace should stay on the same line or go on the next! If we get into near fanatical discussion about such trivial things as this, how can we possibly expect to come to any other decision than "let's give the user an option to choose" with, perhaps, more important decisions?
It should be fairly obvious that the more unimportant choices an end-user needs to make, the less likely that they'll be enjoying their experience. Unlike us developers who use a computer all day, every day, most end-users only use their computers for long enough to actually get a task done. They don't want to spend hours customizing their applications with hundreds of options and add-ins - they want it all to just work, straight out of the box.
Until we can make a decision and stick with it, software will always be hard to use, and it'll always require too much training to get non-technical users proficient with it.