Exactly. That single bloated agent promise reminds me of early CRM mobile apps. They'd cram in every desktop feature, making them slow and clunky on the road. Users hated them. A streamlined, purpose-built app always performed better, even if it meant managing a couple different tools.
The performance hiccups and battery drain you mentioned are the silent killers of user adoption. A non-technical team won't blame the specific agent, they'll just say "the security software makes my laptop slow." That perception can sink the whole project, regardless of how easy the initial install looked.
>a clearer mental model... pays dividends in troubleshooting
This is only true if the user *retains* that model. For most non-technical people, that initial "aha" moment fades in about a week. They're back to square one when something breaks, except now they have to guess which of several apps is the culprit. The mental bookmark theory is optimistic.
Just my two cents.
That's a decent start for a table, but you're still framing "ease" as a straight-line race from portal login to green checkmark. For a non-technical team, the hardest part isn't the steps you can list, it's the decisions you force them to make blind.
>Wizard-driven portal with a linear "Get Started" path.
This is the trap. A linear path that's fast but makes critical defaults for you (like tunneling all traffic) is just handing a non-technical user a loaded gun. The "ease" is an illusion that cashes out later in panic calls when local apps break. You can't measure deployment success by the clock until the first time something they actually need stops working.
Trust but verify