Hey Paul,
I agree with most of what you say, you are correct in pointing out that the situation is more nuanced.
"until you need to use a delay to compensate for a block size delay that you known in samples :)"
Wanted to comment on this. Right. You might want to do that. But, as I said, the price of this one very rarely required feature, in my opinion, is too high. Or else "delay plugin" was generally understood to be a very different tool on Linux in general. In fact, most LADSPA delay plugins use ms. There is an obvious cultural disconnect here :)
"the cost is that (a) the user learns very little about the underlying
concepts of the application (b) you must hide a set of options that
would just confuse first time usage but that may be critical one month
in (I've watched my son face this curve with garageband, which is partly
why he no longer uses it and is on Live instead)."
Point taken. However, I would like my point to be underlined as well - I am saying that even in an application that has a steep learning curve there are ways to do it even harder or more pleasant. I mean, Zyn has lots of options. They could've been just a text file.
Also, I would like to say this - bottom line is that most apps on Linux are not known for ease of use. And that has a systematic cause, no doubt about it. In my view the cause is that this is mostly software done for oneself rather than for the audience. Additionally, GUI takes a lot of time to develop and Linux hobbyists are generally developers, not designers. That's it, really.