no opinion is opinionated
people treat "opinionated" and "general purpose" as opposites. they're not.
the moment you decide what concepts exist, what's visible, what composes, what extends, what hides – you've already expressed a worldview. "no opinion" is itself a strong one.
building for universality means saying something very specific: core concepts should be few, durable, and flexible. users shouldn't be trapped in rigid workflows. abstraction matters more than surface specialization. the system should fold into many shapes without breaking its underlying logic.
this is also why pure customer-centricity falls short. user feedback tells you where friction is. it rarely tells you what the underlying system should be. if you only follow direct user demand, you converge on local maxima – fragmented features, narrow tools, products shaped around current habits rather than enduring concepts.
that gap is where design lives. the work of simplifying reality below the level that's immediately obvious.
great systems don't start by multiplying products. they start by reducing concepts to their essence – until the primitives become clear. then you build paths for each concept to extend, combine, fold into others. the packaging can vary. the essence shouldn't.
this is what lets a system serve beginners without capping experts. serve one domain without being trapped by it.
flexibility isn't the absence of opinion. it's the result of a strong opinion held in cohesion – not about one ideal workflow, but about which concepts are fundamental, which abstractions should endure, which degrees of freedom matter.
simple at the core. open at the edges. that's the ultimate opinion.