There's a distinction to be made between "capable but not overwhelming", "capable and overwhelming", "incapable but not overwhelming", and "incapable but still overwhelming". The first two can both describe advanced systems without dumbification, but the user experience is qualitatively different and can lead to wildly different outcomes when put into use.
You can have an "advanced" (whatever it may mean in context) system which fits into the first two categories, which is very useful to remember. Something I like is command prompts in the style of emacs accessed via M-x and similar shortcuts (or in VS Code, which many more people are familiar with). These permit discovery of new commands and activation of commands without overwhelming the UI. They can also "teach" the user, by providing information like what the keyboard shortcut actually is for activating it. Contrast this with something I've seen in many desktop projects (especially ones targeting a smaller number of power users, versus a more public system distributed to a broader user base): menu hell. All those same commands are still there (maybe), but buried in menus with submenus with submenus. Even though a command may logically appear in multiple places, it probably only appears in one. They may not even appear in a logical place, but just a conventional one, like search commands showing up under "Edit".
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There's a distinction to be made between "capable but not overwhelming", "capable and overwhelming", "incapable but not overwhelming", and "incapable but still overwhelming". The first two can both describe advanced systems without dumbification, but the user experience is qualitatively different and can lead to wildly different outcomes when put into use.
You can have an "advanced" (whatever it may mean in context) system which fits into the first two categories, which is very useful to remember. Something I like is command prompts in the style of emacs accessed via M-x and similar shortcuts (or in VS Code, which many more people are familiar with). These permit discovery of new commands and activation of commands without overwhelming the UI. They can also "teach" the user, by providing information like what the keyboard shortcut actually is for activating it. Contrast this with something I've seen in many desktop projects (especially ones targeting a smaller number of power users, versus a more public system distributed to a broader user base): menu hell. All those same commands are still there (maybe), but buried in menus with submenus with submenus. Even though a command may logically appear in multiple places, it probably only appears in one. They may not even appear in a logical place, but just a conventional one, like search commands showing up under "Edit".