[buchanan]

In "real life" I do a lot of work in human-hardware interaction and measuring effectiveness of different ways of doing things. Without reading too much into it with respect to the particular merits of one control paradigm over another, consider some general thoughts:

What seems (or what they say is) easier or more intuitive to people isn't necessarily. When you want to evaluate the effectiveness of alternatives, measure their actual performance on tasks similar to the ones you care about. "Intuitive" often is used simply as a synonym for "familiar", and people with hard-won skills in a difficult task are prone to describing what they do as "easy".

Subjective evaluations like these are notoriously untrustworthy. If you want to find out what works best, measure how well things work. If you want to give people what they like, ask them what they like. Be careful about confusing the two.