If you saunter on over to Vimperator.org, you will see some heroic members of the hacker race. From their website:
"Writing efficient user interfaces is the main maxim, here at Vimperator labs. We often follow the Vim way of doing things, but extend its principles when necessary.
Towards this end, we've created the liberator library for Mozilla based applications, to encapsulate as many of these generic principles as possible, and liberate developers from the tedium of reinventing the wheel."
Also deserving of honorable mention are the denizens of "suckless.org". Their philosophy is (again, from the website):
"Our project focuses on advanced and experienced computer users. In contrast with the usual proprietary software world or many mainstream open source projects that focus more on average and non-technical end users, we think that experienced users are mostly ignored. This is particularly true for user interfaces, such as graphical environments on desktop computers, on mobile devices, and in so-called Web applications. We believe that the market of experienced users is growing continuously, with each user looking for more appropriate solutions for his/her work style."
In both cases, it reminds me of what I wrote about usability vs. learnability, which is, undoubtedly, why I like it. There are only a few safe havens for the advanced user. Most of the world is trying to build idiot-proof systems. Some of us want power tools. We want tools with pointy edges. We want to be able to do grand things--and this inevitably means having the ability to wreck our own systems.
Despite the small groups interested in a more advanced usability, the world will by and large never accommodate us. Part of the reason is, of course, numbers. I'd rather sell an application with a potential audience of 12 million than of 1200, wouldn't you? But that is not the whole story. Small groups can and have sufficient buying power to warrant some attention. The biggest problem is that it is an audience that can create software to its own specifications and does not need some third party to build it. Worse still, if someone were to provide software for this exclusive market, anything creative or innovative would swiftly be copied into a new project, because the audience is made up of infernal tinkerers.
So, we come back to the place that we started from. Small, dedicated groups of people dedicated to creating truly usable software.