and feel great if we master them...
Wired has a nice story why designers and users both like to venture in 'hard to understand' designs.
The problem is the engineers that design this crap are NOT great doc photogs themselves...they are camera fondlers.
The 2 worst inventions that came down the pike from the camera fondling engineers were the program dial that replaced the shutter speed dial and Fuji's terrible 'focus by wire.'
They keep dummying down the lenses, removing controls like distance scales for zone focus work and aperture controls and turning gear into useless garbage when it comes to serious doc work.
Leica perfected what is needed in a great doc cam eons ago. All the Japanese had to do was copy it and make it affordable. Was that too much to ask of the camera fondling engineers?
Do you want to know what a camera fondler is?
http://www.fujix-forum.com/index.php/topic/25463-which-soft-release-button/?p=269961That guy spends more time changing buttons than pressing them. (They kicked me out of that forum. They didn't like me calling them camera fondlers.)
What else am I going to call them? All you read about is "What did you buy?"..."What are you planning to buy?"
Why not 'What did you shoot'...'What are you planning to shoot?'
Camera fondlers are the problem. When I tried to school the Fuji Rumors crew on zone focus they didn't know what I was talking about. Everything is going to hell with the camera fondlers. Only good thing about them is they keep the cam companies in biz with their continual spending.
The fondlers are on an endless search for the perfect cam that somehow is just beyond their reach and is the reason why they can't produce anything worthwhile with their cams...all the while loaded with fancy push buttons, thumbs up, custom skins, hand made straps, leather half cases and ever other GD thing they can think of to put on a cam to bloat their ego and make their cam more useless.
More than a few guys on the Leica forum wanted to spend $20,000 for a Leica with no screen. They felt the screen was the root of their problems... SAD.