Do the actually not like their users?

Oh yes.  Hideous!  Giving users an option instead of making them recompile the source code.

MacOS X, widely claimed as one of the most user friendly environments, in its 10.5 version
introduced a new look for the Dock.  Users who don't like that look had an option: open a
command line and enter a nasty command.

But they did at least have that option.

Windows, another "user friendly" environment, has about a zillion networking options hidden
inside a command line tool called "netsh".

Displaying all the options instead of a selection of options gives you interfaces like the
older KDE 2 versions, or Gnome 1, or Gnome 2's gconf-editor, or the UI Joel Spolsky uses as
the "worst ever" example: the Windows version of wget, where the UI is just every possible
wget option on a series of tabs in a dialog box.

Instead of all these hard to use options, real users edit the source code and rebuild, like
with the "dwm" window manager.