UEFI is a great example of second system syndrome. In the BIOS world, more featured boot loaders were chained in early (think pxelinux, grub, *BSD loaders etc) so even though it was primitive it wasn't the typical UX. UEFI is almost trollingly bad, the worst amalgamation of low level firmware, boot loader UX, and OS->firmware runtime services I've seen when contrasted to OpenFirmware, uBoot, petitboot.
OpenFirmware was a much more elegant technology sitting around for the lifetime of modern x86 but intel had to be different.
I like the direction IBM is going with OpenPOWER.. petitboot/kexec by default https://sthbrx.github.io/blog/2016/05/13/tell-me-about-petit... although all the firmware sources are on github so you could do whatever the heck you want. It makes intel look positively oppressive.
OpenFirmware was a much more elegant technology sitting around for the lifetime of modern x86 but intel had to be different.
I like the direction IBM is going with OpenPOWER.. petitboot/kexec by default https://sthbrx.github.io/blog/2016/05/13/tell-me-about-petit... although all the firmware sources are on github so you could do whatever the heck you want. It makes intel look positively oppressive.