What I take issue with however is that these warts get conveniently forgotten in the buzz
The problem, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is that happy users are all alike, but every unhappy user is unhappy in her own way.
It's easy to write a review that talks about the core features that a tool gets right. Everyone cares about those features, and everyone uses them, and they're well documented. It is much harder to write a review containing a categorical list of warts. Warts are incidental problems that only bother a subset of users. (If they bothered absolutely everybody, they wouldn't be called warts; they'd have a different name: bugs or misfeatures.)
Worse, one person's wart is another person's feature. Legions of people have complained, over the decades, that rm has a horrible and dangerous UI which lets you accidentally erase your entire machine by typing a stray space at the wrong time. But, somehow, rm persists, because there are plenty of power users who like it.
The problem, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is that happy users are all alike, but every unhappy user is unhappy in her own way.
It's easy to write a review that talks about the core features that a tool gets right. Everyone cares about those features, and everyone uses them, and they're well documented. It is much harder to write a review containing a categorical list of warts. Warts are incidental problems that only bother a subset of users. (If they bothered absolutely everybody, they wouldn't be called warts; they'd have a different name: bugs or misfeatures.)
Worse, one person's wart is another person's feature. Legions of people have complained, over the decades, that rm has a horrible and dangerous UI which lets you accidentally erase your entire machine by typing a stray space at the wrong time. But, somehow, rm persists, because there are plenty of power users who like it.