This is likely an artifact of working in a color model which badly describes the relation between lightness and chroma or lightness and saturation.

If you manipulated colors in a more reasonable color space (this is the fault of tool designers, not users) then you wouldn’t have to spend extra steps of indirection to change the (visually relevant) parameters you care about.

(Edit: and to be clear, my frustration is completely directed at all the software that uses HSL, not at its users.)