There's definitely a learning curve involved. UX improvements tend to follow an arc from "configure everything, expose everything" towards "a bit too crude for power users, but 99% of use-cases are automated, defaulted, and profiled into nothing".
Hacker personalities tend to fall into conflict with that ambition(even if they enjoy the results) since "hackability factor" is dependent on having something to configure, and you can't configure a nothing that just works - especially since in the space between "configure everything" and "just works", you have a form of the uncanny valley effect where the experience gets a lot worse and there is no possibility to configure yourself out of it. That stops UX from enjoying simple incremental improvements.
The very UNIX-y solution is to have a nice, simple, friendly UI on top of the infinitely-configurable command-line engine. Or better yet, two different friendly UIs and you choose which one you like better.
And that's what got us into the mess we're in, because by now there are 754 friendly UIs, and choosing which one you like better is draining your soul.
You. Don't. Want. Infinitely. Configurable.
What you do want is lots of simple, friendly tools with limited configurability that you can connect to solve larger issues.
To compare it to language, you don't want to have two great novels that are paths through "choose your own adventure". You want words that work together, that are composable according to well-understood, simple rules.
Whenever a system like that comes along (unix pipes, REST APIs), people can build amazing things on top of that. The infinitely configurable hypercomplex thing idea gives you XSL:FO, XSLT, the W3C, C++, and assorted fun.
Hacker personalities tend to fall into conflict with that ambition(even if they enjoy the results) since "hackability factor" is dependent on having something to configure, and you can't configure a nothing that just works - especially since in the space between "configure everything" and "just works", you have a form of the uncanny valley effect where the experience gets a lot worse and there is no possibility to configure yourself out of it. That stops UX from enjoying simple incremental improvements.