EDITed for clarity. I don't get your points here.
these look like by various different subbers so they're not "doing things" at all just hosting;
The "doing things" quote was in relation to erai-raws vs Horriblesubs. I said erai-raws is doing things similar to how HS did them (simulcast rips not subbing). That's entirely unrelated to shanaproject.
I think the interface is more opaque than nyaa since they aren't really using colors and they've divided things in ways that make it pop less.
They don't need color coding. On nyaa, all Eng anime is purple. Shanaproject is only Eng anime, so everything here would come under the purple filter. Hence, it doesn't need to be color-coded unless you're asking for them to use color-coding at a higher level of granularity than nyaa does.
Seems like it's just a RSS manager for when you know exactly what you want already.
Not really. It's all Eng releases of airing shows by major groups. You don't need to know what groups exist or what shows are airing to use this, you just need to speak English and want to watch current shows. Quickly browsing the list informs you about what shows are out this season, then you can just pick a release to follow. Most of the time, i just browse this then once I know what's actually being released I cross-reference the shows with season charts to see which ones I like the look of. At least this way you know that the shows you're considering watching are actually out, rather than having to go through season charts then discovering hardly any of it's out yet.
If you already know exactly what file you want and you're familiar with the subber and how they do things, that's not hard on nyaa either.
This is slightly contradictory. you really do need to know exactly what you want before even venturing into nyaa. You really don't for shanaproject.
I don't even see ways to add search filters, for example to only show the highest resolution available
It's not a useful idea. Shana is only for currently airing English subbed anime after all, it's already plenty filtered as a result, and it's hard to actually come up with filters that would
do anything other than for sub group or title. It's as complicated as it needs to be. Considering that many releases will be in 3 quality choices and the search gives 50 things per page, searching by title or sub group alone give the last 17 relevant releases. This is plenty to work out what's out, and the options for who's releasing it, and since you only need to tag a single episode to follow the whole thing, you really don't need to manually track down all the prev episodes the way you do on nyaa.
I also see no file type indication whatsoever.
click the + button to the left, and additional information is listed. I even mentioned that button in my post. Note however, that nyaa lacks
any sort of indication of file type in their main search listings, so if that's something you care about, shanaproject actually wins on that point.