It’s not clear to me that you are aware of the different Ardour themes …
BTW, the “ugliness” I was asking about related to DHealey’s comment, not yours.
In general, it is my policy to completely ignore GUI critiques. For every person who says they find Ardour’s GUI to be <insert-negative-adjective-here>, somebody else says they love it, and so there’s not much point considering general aesthetic remarks.
However, for UX it’s a different story. Here, there is a lot of scope for useful suggestions and observations.
The problem with the comparison with Musescore (which Tantacrul has indeed helped improve dramatically) is that while complex, it is an order of magnitude less complex than a DAW. Martin’s general approach with MS has been to really focus on “the most used” aspects of the UI, and hide the rest (not very far) away. This is relatively easy to do when the task at hand is constrained to “create notation”. In the DAW context, you’ve got the massive issue that there’s a different workflow for every 10 users, and coming up with something that is just naturally “right” for everyone is massively harder.
The most common approach to this is to allow users to hide/show many different parts of the UI so that they end up with something “right” for them. Reaper does this to some extent, but I’ve seen lots of complaints from a certain type of user that they find this approach too geeky and creates too much of a burden for them. So … great for some, not so great for others.
There are very few DAWs (other than Garageband) which really pass the UX smell test, because all of them (us!) have to deal with the almost impossible task of balancing exposing functionality and cluttering/overwhelming the interface. GB works because … well, it doesn’t have much functionality. Even with Reaper, there’s a clear fanbase of people who love its dense, context-menu heavy design but also a bunch of people who tried it and just couldn’t (or didn’t want to) deal with it. They’ve already moved on, and don’t spend much time writing up critiques of Reaper.
Over the years, I’ve heard from people who say things like “Logic Pro is just so confusing and ugly to me, and I’ve used it for 10 years, but Ardour is so lovely to use”. But I also hear from people who say “Ardour is a piece of shit and you should embarrased to even be trying to sell it”. So … it is necessary to give up the idea that one DAW can possibly be the DAW for everyone. I’m fine with that. Fortunately, most people have at least a dozen excellent, capable DAWs to choose from, and if it turns out that Ardour doesn’t satisfy their aesthetic sense and/or workflow needs, almost certainly another DAW will.
What I am Interested in is actionable, debatable, ponderable changes that come with a cost/benefit analysis. DHealey already got halfway to providing an example above:
Of course, the cost/benefit analysis is missing there, which needs to grapple with the usual challenge of discoverability versus clutter. By contrast, people who say “be more like ” are (a) missing the point (b) just going to be ignored, because this is not actionable, or debatable and has no cost/benefit analysis.