I hereby apologize Mr. Wiggles for quiting him on something that he did not say.
Problem #1:
The game is still in ALPHA. Namely all the current UI are, effectively, place-holders. Creating a more user-friendly UI (which would likely lock down some features) would result in Toady potentially needing to tear-down the whole thing later down the road in order to add more features.]
Sit back and think really hard.
Alpha (aside of murdering psychopaths) is basically testing version. You test implementation, ideas, mechanics and
gui.
There is no excuse not to test new, friendly, gui approaches, because that is one of things that are supposed to happen while game is in alpha/beta.
Many features nowadays are placeholders: caravans for example. They will be torn down and redone later on, including scrapping many related things in game. But they exist and are sources of comments (hey, let us import sand! hey, trading goblin rags is overpowered! etc ...) and serve purporse just fine.
As far as scrapping goes, it is not exactly good way to look at it: sure, it will be eventually obsoleted and redone. But it will be done again using experience (and hopefully) and existing code. Besides, has it crossed anyones mind that with a bit of thinking, gui can be done well enough not to require completelly rewrite every times new feature is added?
Aplha is opportunity to improve and refine gui, not excuse for dark ages. That is whole point of being in aplha: write stuff, see how it works, if not, scrap and redo it. People need to overcome enviromentalist coding mentality (not a line wasted!).
Right now, game is really showing what happens when gui is treated as "i'll do it later" thing. Impaler was afraid that Later means Never. Since there will always be yet another feature to add, Later can indeed mean Never, especially if people support this course of action.
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While are we talking about player contributions compare "V"isualize function with pretty much any visualizer tool.
Notice how ingame visualizer is quite ... crappy. Experimental feature that should have been removed long time ago for all confusion it does. Look at existing, opensource, licence unecumbered and fairly advanced (as advanced as it can get) visualizers. Stonesense is basically what happens if someone focuses on their feature and does not stray. Why is it not intengrated already?
Dwarf therapist is another example for gui that is not even in game yet, yet desperatelly needed.
I can only imagine what would happen to stocks menu (DQL - Dwarf Querry Language!) or building material selection and all the screens when players got power to help out with them ...