> I struggle to understand so much hostility to this approach.
It's going to be really rough for a lot of folks as machines get better and better at domains that the human brain was exclusively useful for. I tend to view the hostility as a mix of both "unless we have proof this could all be hokum" and "we're going to lose a lot of what we consider makes humans amazing".
Compassion is going to be very, very important in the next few years. We're going to hurt, both internally and externally.
Very little of lifestyle products is about need. Folks will open their wallets for some combination of personal wants, exclusivity (or the illusion of it), or even something as simple as a coffee table discussion piece.
These sorts of "collectible clones" are pretty popular at the moment. A big part of it is nostalgia.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
There are many great quotes by Nintendo folks about this approach. One of my favorites:
> I like to think of it like buying a car. Admit it. Your left brain looks at a vehicle in terms of the numbers. What's the horsepower? The towing capacity? The 0-60? That's our competitor's approach. But your right brain is different. There's only one question out there: sitting behind the wheel, where will this baby take me? In other words, do you want to go just a little bit faster, down the same streets you've always driven, or down a new road, to places you've never seen before? That's the difference with Nintendo DS.
Your points are good ones, especially since they emphasize that different people have different expectations of what a "button" is and isn't. Your points individually describe a button with a label, one with a toggle, an actual button, and a progress indicator. All of those things can be "buttons" depending on the user.
I think you’re getting pushback because of this choice of language. It’s not the only goal, but it is a key feature. BI supports choices of how to spend your time and enables freedoms.
> In the region where I live, 20-35% of household income is spent on cars and that doesn’t include the expense of the land devoted to them or road maintenance.
Statistically, a large amount of that is beyond what they need most of the time (whether size, quality, or range).
The evolved response to CO2 is part of the human body’s ability to filter and remove CO2 via the respiratory system. AFAIK we don’t have similar capacity for Nitrogen because it’s not a primary waste product of that system.