When Assist was put out with v6.03 (or thereabouts), I tried it and immediately hated it. When the Query tool was being pushed along with 6.07 (?), I tried it and again immediately hated it.

For someone who is used to SAS (and this is a personal view, of course), SAS/Assist was too basic, and for someone who knew nothing about SAS it was still too advanced without their learning about basic concepts. I think by the time they did, it still wasn’t up to scratch. The same goes for the Query tool, especially on a mainframe (where I first used it). There’s too much pointing and clicking, and little or no way to do repeated processes.

EG is more advanced than either of these, naturally. But I still find that the interface gets in the way of what I want to do. I have always raged against MS/Access (quite rightly!), largely because it was almost invariably used wrongly, but also because the paradigm that it set up didn’t map on to how I wanted to do stuff.

EG has a place, and a perfectly valid one. It’s a relatively cheap way to roll SAS out across an enterprise, but there will always be stick-in-the-muds like me who want something else.