I don't see how his UI is so great. It seems that the main difference is it is done with a mouse and not a keyboard. This means MORE sub-menus, which in my opinion means a worse UI.
Of course I'm used to playing FPS where I'm the utility guy and can do just about any action fairly quickly, so I am used to the mouse only being used to aim and fire, not be any more useful than that. Maybe that makes me pretty biased, knowing how to navigate a keyboard effectively. Most people I know who were turned off the game would also be turned off of RPG maker. It's about the pretty colors. The only way Toady could capture them is to make his game a full 3-d client. maybe if one of the visualizers allowed exchanges of information they might get more, but I doubt it.
If Toady really wanted to do a "prettying up" for the game, he should seperate tiles from letters and let us make real tilesets and keep our text intact.
For the UI, he's progressing fine. You have to play with the feature before you know how you want to establish it. If you all really had that much issue with the UI, why not create a post about what is your problem with the UI, or what your new people found insurmountable with it.
Here's an example of how to do that, and likely get a response:
I don't like how the military screen has no mouse support when trying to click on the wizbang. It would be nice if when you clicked on the wizbang it cycled through the option to be cowardly or to be brave. More advanced options could be done by holding down on one of those and getting a submenu of wizbang effects. For keyboard input it could be keys c and b, with shift-C for submenu of cowardly wizbang, and Shift-B for brave wizbang. Doing it like this makes it easier to get a basic wizbang established while still allowing for the complex wizbang stances.
Toady can examine that, and a few others, and puts it together to give it a test run in the next version, especially if it sounds like it would be a great improvement.
If you all think this guy's UI is so great, provide details as to why you think it is. I personally feel it's crap, since it just replaces current actions with mouse clicks instead. (Rectangles? k and u. Long walls? u. It'd be nice if wall segments allowed corners, but the commands work just fine, and we have a macro creator that you can setup to make your corners. I haven't used it yet, but it's there. All the clicking to me is stupid though. It requires more clicking in his "demo" than it requires to play Warcraft 3 effectively.)