There are well-documented user interface design guidelines to follow, both vendor specific and general ones made by experts like Jakob Nielsen.

Well-designed user interfaces lend themselves to user experiences where the learning curve is low, not steep, sometimes coming close to flat.

The only excuse I can fathom for those who prefer the learning curve be as high as possible or never be lowered is resentment that their own efforts to scale the same mountain of learning the UI themselves.

I call that technical elitism. It says “I worked hard to learn how complicated interfaces work, everybody else should be held to the same expectation”. No, they should not.