Sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the novice users who, over time, become power users through repetitive usage. If there are no user efficiency gains to be had through experience in a UI, then it just prevents the emergence of power users. Users just have to wait until a product manager or designer somewhere notices their pain and create a new feature through 10x the effort it would have taken to simply maintain the lower level shortcuts (e.g. keyboard accelerators, simple step automations).