I think somehow you missed my entire point. In the lightset example, I'm not saying people should continue to buy what they need, I'm saying that the application should provide different/better approaches that will make it easier for people to do it themselves. Just because the traditional lighting metaphor is moving lights around and adjusting falloff, intensity, etc, doesn't mean that's necessarily the easiest for everyone, especially the more casual user to grasp. There's always going to be a learning curve but intelligent software design can do a lot to lessen the slope of that hill. That's part of the key to the whole 'prosumer' world. Whether it's 35mm or video cameras, desktop publishing or whatever. They would not be nearly as popular if the technology hadn't become more user friendly. They've done such a good job at it that you now see backward migration of some of the ease of use feature to the professional grade tools. The auto-focus, electronic, icon driven approach won't always give you the complete degree of flexibility and power that old fashioned knob twirling will but the knobs should still be there and more importantly, if you make 90 or even 80 per cent of the total available, that's what most people will want most of the time. Years ago, it took a skilled artist to produce police sketches. Then, someone invented the Identikit and suddenly everything changed. You might still need an artist to get the most refined likeness but now you can a novice quickly produce a workable likeness. Unfortunately, that's the kind of innovative approace you're more likely to see from a game company than from a 3d company and that needs to change.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken