What's tricky about output-formatting?

Question

So as part of my mucking about with the StackExchange API I decided to check what kind of questions high-rep people tend to ask.

I pulled in all the question data and then took the rep of the user asking each question and grouped those by the question tags:

$reputationTags =
  GroupBy[
   Flatten@
    Normal@
     Map[
      Thread[#owner["reputation"] -> #tags] &,
      $questions[All, {"tags", "owner"}][
       Select[#owner["user_type"] != "does_not_exist" &]
       ]
      ],
   Last -> First
   ];

Then taking only those tags that get a lot of love on the site (i.e which are used more than 100 times (in this case) I find something interesting:

repTags[n_: 0] :=

  Reverse@Sort[
     N@*Mean /@ Select[$reputationTags, GreaterThan[n]@*Length]] // 
   Dataset;
repTags[100]

Most of these tags make sense to me--they're poorly documented or new or require a certain amount of knowledge to make sense of--until we get to "output-formatting". Note that this is higher even than "graphics".

So what makes "output-formatting" tricky? I'm guessing there are things to learn here which I do not yet know.

Answer 1

You get a different view of things if you examine the number of questions asked by high-rep users. For instance, for users with rep > 2000:

ClearAll[repTags];
repTags[nQ_: 0, minR_: 0] := 
  Reverse@Sort[
     Length@*Select[GreaterThan[minR]] /@ 
      Select[$reputationTags, GreaterThan[nQ]@*Length]] // Dataset;

repTags[100, 2000]

output-formatting is ranked 28th (38 questions). So while the average rep of the askers of output-formatting questions is high, the number of questions asked is low, while the number of graphics questions is quite high. output-formatting rises to 13th (22 questions) if the rep limit is set to 10000, which is in line with the high mean rep of the tag.

There's a similar drop in the ranking of dynamic. My guess is that output-formatting, like dynamic, is difficult to accomplish sophisticated things, and high-rep users are more likely to be interested in applications for other end-users and other things that call for sophistication. Mr. Wizard's comment that high-rep users are interested in Mathematica itself also seems to me to be a likely reason (e.g., Rojo's pacman drinking beer question). The mean-rankings depend on the relative proportion of high to low rep. Many of the low to medium rep users seem to be interested in M as a tool and are principally interested in getting the right answer, not in output-formatting (unless you include plotting as a special case of output formatting, but I am thinking of a plot as a sort of answer or solution).

[And it's nice to see plotting ahead of graphics in this list, because it seems much harder to get things just right with plotting than with graphics.]

---

Interesting transitions in ranking depending on rep (10-1000, 7500-8000 -- if you go higher, the number of questions gets small enough that the difference of a couple of questions can make a great change in ranking):

With[{keys = Normal@Keys@repTags[140, 1]},
 ListPlot[MapThread[
   Callout[Tooltip[#1, #2], #2] &,
   {Transpose@
     Table[Thread@{k + 1, 
        34 - Ordering@Ordering@Normal@Values@repTags[140, k][keys]}, {k, 
       Range[1000, 10000, 500]}],
    keys}],
  Joined -> True, ImageSize -> {Automatic, 400}, 
  ScalingFunctions -> "Reverse", Frame -> True, AspectRatio -> 1., 
  PlotRange -> {{1000, 10001}, All}]
 ]