The thing that has irritated me often is not that people are idiots but they often lack of self belief that they could learn to do something. The key here is the secretaries didn’t realise they were learning to code, but if you told them to learn to code they would most likely make excuses.
We bought a new iSeries mainly because the accounting staff said, point blank, the GUI on the replacement system was total crap. The green screen is efficient and they can get everything done quickly without moving a hand off the keyboard.
Legacy text based solutions that survived are usually much better designed by people who actually spoke to the users.