Why are networking UI's so technical and unintuitive?

Question

Even though I am an experienced programmer and engineer, I find that I always run into tedious problems when dealing with networks. Rarely do installations of routers etc work out of the box, and you find yourself trying to learn all kinds of acronyms like WPA, UPnP, etc, and have a hard time trying to map these with the conceptual logic of networking. I think this is particularly true of networking; it is a lot easier to troubleshoot things like compiling, installing hardware peripherals, or display East Asian fonts on your computer.

Why are networking UI:s so poor? Is networking intrinsically complex and difficult, reflecting the UI? Due to security issues? Or are the problems more of historical nature? Or do you disagree with me entirely?

UPDATE 2009/22/1: I think the commenters below have a good point in that appliance companies don't afford to contract software engineers, giving priority to hardware skill. But I feel that networking is worse than any other category when it comes to UI, terminology etc, so I am looking for answers that is particular to networking.

Answer 1

No commonality.

Every vendor has differing ideas on what the interface should be like, and quite often different terminology.

Not to mention the fact that most of the equipment is made in the far east and the translations, either documentation or in the software interfaces is usually very poor.