Hi Richard, I think you nailed it, and I encourage everybody to read your e- mail ... twice. :-)
I must admit, I'm finding Drupal's admin interface and usability to be a real problem. I myself can work out how to do everything, but I am not at all confident that the manager would be able to maintain the site in the long run.
I think our short-term priorities should be to: 1. Integrate the primary/secondary navigation system. 2. Simplify the theme settings pages. 3. Rename 'path alias' to 'custom URL' (patch pending). It would come a long way improving the out-of-the-box user experience, and is absolutely necessary if we want to make Drupal more accessible. Anyone?
As Dries has indicated, the menu_otf module has been merged into the menu module. This is great as it will allow my site owners to manage their navigation panel(s) through the same interface they manage the content. I would like to see the settings panel and the jjeff patch also included in this module to make it so much more useful. Allowing the user to control the order of their menu through the Content interface is essential.
I'm not familiar with jjeff's patch. Can you provide me a link so I can check it out?
The built-in upload module does not allow comments and titles to be added to files. This is included in the attachment module (which requires one of the file management modules) but I think this is should be a core feature. I include this "feature request" in a usability discussion because without this functionality in the core module I need to install the attachment and filesystem modules, increasing the complexity of my sites and therefore reducing the usability.
There is a patch in the patch queue that lets you add titles to uploaded files. It doesn't add comments though. Maybe 'title' should simly be renamed 'description'?
There is a good deal of confusion with terminology used in the path module. On the Create Content page the heading is "path alias". You then specify an "alternative URL" but are then warned about the "URL alias" not working. It took me a good while to work out that this was all talking about the same thing and that the "url alias" admin menu option was managing the path module. I'd be happy to see this all changed to "friendly URL" throughout (including the module name) because the only reason to use this module is to make your URLs friendly to both humans and search engines.
There is a patch for this in the patch queue; it needs some additional love before it can be included. I wrote an e-mail about that earlier today. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/