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[Phibes]

That exactly the reason TO put it on the back burner: it's much easier to create a well organized, intuitive and aesthetically pleasing UI when you're not throwing in a new feature every five second.

Yes, but this is unlikely to change. DF will never be feature complete, certainly not for years to come. That's a very long time to wait for a decent interface.

[MadocComadrin]

I'm certain we'll get a time where a new feature isn't as likely as improved current features. Likewise, with large parts of the code base getting gutted or refactored, it won't reach that time for quite a while.

The time to improve the UI will make itself apparent to Toady and then he'll do some work on it.

[cvar]

I actually like the keyboard-driven nature of the ui, but I also think it's dreadful from a design and usability perspective in its current state. I can't quite agree with the idea of putting usability on the back burner since the game shows no signs of settling down in regards to features. It's like a sports car with broken door handles and no power steering.

I hope it keeps shortcuts too, since that's pretty fast and I agree that it could be improved, but it's not broken.  It's the plain jane doorhandles that came with the car.  The old ones that stick out 3 inches from the door.  It's there, you can use it, but god is it ugly.

Door handle doesn't really cover it though.  The UI would be more like the paint/interior part.  What kind of lunacy would it require to do all the work getting a car ready to paint, spray it, then try to chop the roof?  You'd have to redo the entire car!  Still running wires for the radio, but the carpets been tacked in!  (Also, ended up changing the shifter from the on-the-tree to a standard 5 speed mounted through the floor since it worked better with the engine you just replaced.)

There's still a lot of work going on with how the game runs.  Given how drastically the military screen changed, it'd be kind of silly for him to spend a lot of time working on the game UI when he's clearly not done with how the game itself will work.  Since it works as is (even if it is messy), it's better to leave it until he's just adding features and not completely changing parts of the game.

[smakemupagus]

Am I one of the few ones who actually like the UI? Everything is just a few key presses away and easy to access once you get used to the shortcuts. The fact that you don't need a mouse makes everything even smoother since you can have both hands on the keyboard.

No, you're not alone, I like the interface too (don't get me wrong, there's plenty to improve).  But the core system is very efficient, as you say everything is just a few key presses away.

Of course, features that are in active development have some of the worst interface parts, i.e. to give two examples: military in the past, tramcarts now.  This is what happens when you play a game in Alpha, I suppose.  I've played with worse interface problems for big budget games in Beta or even sometimes on release.  In the previous version my two biggest complaints about UI were 'no multi z designations' and 'too easy to typo-delete your whole burrows'.  Lo and behold both fixed in DF2012.