I'm not sure what I'm going to put here but the initial idea is to put some thoughts about how I look at the whole system.

For instance, the longer you work with a particular vendor the more you'll probably hate them. This is because you have time to bump into all the little annoyances and corner cases where their gear won't do what you want or is just generally a PITA. You'll also have a chance to really test their support and you'll probably learn that it sucks. I could explain why I think (almost) everyone's support sucks but that would veer into general philosophy and the state of the world and this isn't the place where I do that.

🤷🏻‍♂️

I am a CLI guy. There's nothing wrong with GUIs if they're done right but they hide too much information and they often make it hard to get data out of the system so I can munge it. They often give the option to down a CSV that doesn't have the info I want while they prevent me from simply copying it out of the web page, or they mangle it during the copy.

CLI's are powerful. They let you break things at an extremely high rate of speed. And fix things at an extremely high rate of speed. They let you plan things ahead of time so that a change becomes hours planning the right commands followed by minutes of actually making a change. Planning the same thing in a GUI is a huge PITA often involving screenshots that you have to mark up with “click here”, “now click here”, “the OK button is hidden in this weird place”, etc.

API's can also be wonderful, if they're done right. IMO vendors should design the CLI, then make APIs that expose EVERY CLI option, and then design a GUI that exposes the most used and/or useful parts of the API.