Why are setup menus always so badly designed?

I've just finished retuning my Freeview (for non-Brits, that's the digital terrestrial TV service) box to restore half the channels that disappeared today. This wasn't a surprise since they've been showing warning messages that it would happen for a few days (apparently they're moving some of the channel frequencies around to be able to fit HD channels in), but I think doing the retuning was much less straightforward than it should have been. I initially tried just going through the setup menus to try to find a way to do it, in my opinion any relatively simple piece of consumer electronics should be possible to set up most of the time just from the on-screen menu, but despite selecting the update channels button it didn't decide to do anything useful. I then consulted the Freeview website where they've helpfully put up instructions for lots of different makes of Freeview box but, inevitably, not the model I have and although there were other Philips models their instructions referred to menu options I didn't have. The instructions for the other Philips models did suggest resetting the channel list completely, so I found my copy of the instruction manual and looked up how to do that. The steps were so intuitive I'm not sure how I didn't figure it out myself, apparently I had to switch off the power to the box then turn it back on while pressing the + key on the box, waiting until a red light appeared then releasing the + key, then press the + key again, wait until a second red light appears and then type 9900 on the remote control then wait for a minute and a screen will come up offering to scan for channels. This did work, and I now have all the channels again (and the quality of the reception seems to be improved a bit for some of them), but I do think the steps I had to go through were a bit ridiculous. Given that they thought resetting the channel list was a common enough thing to do that they devoted an entire page of the manual to it, surely they could have added it to the setup menu instead of forcing the user to type in obscure codes.

Getting the channels back probably isn't hugely important to be honest, given the dearth of decent programs on the additional Freeview channels, the biggest loss would have been Channel 5 and I rarely watch that (although given that I started watching the reasonably promising-looking Flash Forward on Monday on 5, it would have been a bit annoying to lose that now.