Joel Spolsky, aka "Joel on Software", has a fun rant from last week about how complicated software is. Sometimes I think things aren't as bad as he says, the rest of the time I know they're worse.

Joel notes that you can't intelligently criticize a software ecosystem (the Windows ecosystem, the Linux one) until you really know it. You don't really know it until you've spent years learning the tiny details that rarely but importantly affect your job. And I'll add to Joel's point that by the time you really know it, you can no longer criticize at all: you're too deeply bought in (see Influence for commitment and consistency) and too habituated to one way of doing things for any other way to seem at all reasonable.