I think that it is far more common mistake for mass-market targeted software to be hard for novice users than it is for software targeted at power-users to be insufficiently programmable.

I think the mistake is less about making software less programmable and more about trying to appeal to some mythical idealized "common man" so hard that you appeal to nobody. It's the same strategy a politician uses when they go to the Midwest to find "Real Americans" only to find out that nobody really cares all that much.

Power users aren't very common, but they exist. The idealized "common man" doesn't because everybody truly is different.