I have 2 Wordpress powered sites and am beginning development of a third. I migrated to WordPress from Typepad and went to Typepad from Blogger and have been blogging since 2003 merely as a creative outlet so I have been a user for awhile.

I agree that what we want to see as users are the right options as opposed to no options. I am not a coder, I am all about content. What I look for in any theme or plugin I use are (a) it scratches an itch and (b) it is configurable with plenty of options that may or may not be important to me now but will be perhaps down the line.

I have always appreciated having an "Advanced Options" feature. It tells me that if the default functionality that I am using ever becomes limited I can customize the plugin or theme to better meet my needs.

A lot of WordPress users I suspect are like me. They create content and they use WordPress because it is the best, most configurable tool out there. But what we appreciate is that it both works "out of the box" but still allows us to extend its use if we so desire. Taking away options might make sense from a developer standpoint (since I am not a developer I can't be sure) do not often make sense from a user's perspective.

Most plugins that I use rely on the default settings with some advanced options turned on, usually after I understand what they do. This is something I would hate to lose. Simplicity is fine where it makes sense but removing options to me seems to be a retrograde step.

As a user, I like my options, even if I don't use most of them because ultimately, somebody does.