More Features Don't Make Software Better

Forgive the clickbaity title. It's not entirely true, but it is accurate to the spirit of what I'm describing. I have frustration when explaining this to people, and I've struggled to articulate it well until now.

If your software has 100 features, but all of them suck, then I have no reason to use your product. But if your software has even one feature that feels very well considered, thought-out, and cared for, I now have a reason to use your product.

A similar principle applies when applying for jobs. If you send out 100 job applications that all suck, then every single one of them is going to be rejected. You can't scam someone into giving you a job. I spent two weeks refining my resume, and only sent it to two companies. Both companies also got cover letters from me. I got an offer from the second job I applied for¹.

My code editor of choice is helix. It doesn't have a lot of features. In fact, it doesn't even support extensions yet². But I keep coming back to it because the mental model it asks me to adopt is very simple compared to something like Vim, and much more efficient than VS Code. I select text, and then perform an action. The other things I need out of a code editor are just good enough to get by. There is a built-in file explorer and ripgrep tool. I've tried LazyVim in the past, and even though it had more features, I couldn't shake the feeling that none of them were designed to work nicely with each other. So despite how much functionality there was, I didn't feel good about using any of it.

Sonic Frontiers, after releasing, had three updates to the game that were released for free. There were a lot of interesting ideas in those updates. They did try to address some of the issues players had with the game, such as the lack of momentum when jumping. But there were other ideas that I found questionable. Action chain challenges are cool, but would it really improve how players perceive the game if it were there at launch? None of the updates improved the art direction, or addressed the gratuitous pop-in, or made the existing Cyberspace stages feel less like copies of older levels. The final update came with a new campaign at the end of the game with multiple playable characters. The lack of multiple playable characters is a long-standing complaint in the Sonic community, but the gameplay for these characters was so difficult to control (with the exception of Amy) that I would rather have not played as them at all.

I don't think it should be acceptable to excuse having lots of bugs because you also have a lot of features. It would make sense that more features would induce more bugs, but that's still worse for the end-user. I'd rather have software that doesn't do much, but also doesn't annoy me with problems while it does very little. Those annoyances will cause some users to find other options, even if those other options may not do everything your software does.

All of this is my opinion. I won't claim that everyone else feels the same way, or that following this approach will make you more money in the long run. But personally, I prefer a piece of software that has one feature I really like, to a piece of software that has 100 features that I only tolerate.