> What these authors should be doing is optimizing for the 80%, which means an opinionated top layer that offers a single way to do everything that 80% of your users would want to do. Then if you're smart, you'll have a layered architecture (which the 80% layer rests upon) that allows the other 20% to learn about how the sausage is made in order to do their complex tasks.

A good example of this approach is MSBuild + Nuke [1]. You can have as much complexity as you want in your Nuke build script (which is plain C# in a normal, debuggable C# project), but MSBuild has to exist to bootstrap the Nuke build script.

[1] http://www.nuke.build/