You seem to have a lot of complaints about the internet and they may even be valid concerns on their own, but I fail to see how this relates to CLI vs. GUI. Google Reader would still be dead if you interacted with it via CLI. GitHub would still be dead if their servers shut down. Maybe you're equating CLI with some "good old days" that you fondly remember?
CLIs are family of UIs, whose name is normally used to identify TUIs at a whole, while GUIs tend to identify ONLY modern GUIs, so ignoring the classic Documenti UIs and that's the trick.
My point is:
- modern TUIs, called by most CLIs, compared to modern GUIs (widget based GUIs and WebUIs) are more powerful because AT LEAST they allow limited easy user extensibility and composability (scripts and unix IPCs);
- classic GUIs, in the sense of document UIs, like Emacs, like old Xerox Tioga etc, on contrary can be called 2D CLIs in modern lingo and they are FAR superior both of TUIs and modern GUIs because they are "graphical" and they are even more extensible and composable than TUIs.
That's is. Modern developers regularly push toward classic GUIs without knowing them, think for instance how popular Notebook UIs have became. WebUI themselves as a "more like documents" widgets-based GUIs. Still are are far behind classic document UIs.
