While listening to your podcast and your discussion with Bob Dunn about the problem with people overusing "WordPress is Easy". You also alluded to an issue with new users getting distracted fom important things while fooling with sexy ones and getting nowhere. I had an idea which could help with those problems.

Suppose there were 4 different versions of the admin panel, beginner, intermediate, advanced, and master, and a button to switch among them. The beginner version would be restricted to the things that are most fundamental, to eliminate the more complicated or less fundamental items from becoming a distraction. You'd have posts and pages, but not plugins. Themes might have a couple built in to chose from, but no way to download. As the noob user accomplished things they'd build up points behind the scene, and when they hit the button to switch to intermediate, they would be given an advisory scorecard that itemized the things they've done out of the list of the things they need to know how to do, and if they didn't score well enough they'd be gently encouraged to stay in beginner mode and learn those things they haven't yet done. This is optional, of course, they can just ignore it and go on.

Each level of the admin panel would have two colors for tasks, with all tasks in any lower levels one color and the new ones added in the new level a different color. Upon moving to the next level up, more would go to the "done, or understood" color and new tasks would appear in the "learning" color. During install there could be an option for which level to start at.