Grr... I hate usability

Would you believe that I've spent FAR more time (and lines of code) making my current scripting consignment easy to use and configure, than on its core functionality?
This is insane. Why do people think it's so hard to pop open a script or notecard and fill in a couple of parameters?
And why is llDialog so @#$%@#$% PRIMITIVE!!??
It's like, 90% of my code is stupid boring nested dialog crap and different configuration states for different types of users, gah, the pain, make it stop!
If this person knew how to code, they could achieve what they want by hardcoding a few keys and using a single for loop
I hate bloatware, and creeping featuritis, and most of all I hate the stupid limitations imposed on just about every LSL command.

Unfortunately usability is what makes things accessible - you could have all the wizz-bang features you want but they're pretty useless unless the intended user has a good way of accessing them.

The problem in SL is that it doesn't actually provide much help in creating useable interfaces, so you do have to end up using great wadges of code simply to try and make it more accessible.

I find that I often spend more time on creating the interface for an item, rather than on the core functionality of the item itself. It is a problem in SL, there’s no doubt about that.

That's what scripting is, Eggy. It's putting an interface on something totally obvious, or putting several totally obvious things together to accomplish a task.

I agree with you about the llDialog thing, though. That's just silly. (Why? Why only 4 buttons? 5 or 6 would have let us do so much more!)

I find that with just about any programming or scripting task I spend considerably more time on the user interface than the core functionality.

Core functionality is generally easy and straight-forward:

1. read this data and move it over here
   
2. reformat this data so it looks like this
   
3. process this data using these rules, then send it over there
   
4. etc
   

Enter the "end user" and all the nice tidiness goes to hell. People want that core functionality to exist, but they want to see it happen in a way that is intuitive to the average person. 95% of the time this "intuitive" behavior is completely backward from the original intent of the application.

Of course the only way to navigate this common issue with any proficiency is to design the core functionality with open-endedness and reusability in mind right from the start. LSL doesn't exactly give us the best environment for this, but it is exactly why the N-tier application development model is so popular these days. It is possible to do tiered development in LSL, but it is generally slow and kludgy at best.