The issue I have with the existing Help documentation is that the "search" feature with it isn't particularly useful in my experience. In response you get a group of topic headings (the majority of which inevitable end up being techy Calibre API help which the average user does not care about) and have to click and pray within each that you drill down to something relevant.
I know there are some genuine gold nuggets within Calibre Help, and I don't mean to denigrate those who have contributed so hard to add tutorials etc. We completely understand with a fast moving program the docs will not be as up to date. But if you can't quickly find what you want you will end up coming to the forums (assuming you did look in the Help first at all of course). Out of date screenshots in the opening GUI section don't endear confidence about how frequently the help is maintained and given how fast new features appear in Calibre you are never quite sure if the answer in there is the "best one".
When I first got Calibre I'm sure I asked a couple of the same questions that I have since seen repeatedly made over and over. From memory there was one on author sorts and another for regexes for importing. I was fortunate to get some patient and helpful responses. I had used the search but as the threads at the time covered so many calibre versions and I thought my particular author sort issues were a bug I can understand why some people just want the "latest" version of an answer.
Plus the existing FAQ thread is not an FAQ, it's a train wreck. It is a "I will ask yet another question in here" thread. No-one is going to read through 80 pages of discussion in the hope they learn all they need to know. By all means I think it should be "demoted" from sticky status and your "start here" thread put in it's place.
Calibre is a HUGE program, like Griker I have dabbled as a developer around the code to a much lesser extent but there are massive areas I have not a clue about. As a Calibre user I don't want to have to wade through page after page of forum search results of varying relevance and up-to-dateness. It is hard enough reading through one thread at times, let alone multiple. What would be awesome is to have one "proper" FAQ thread as an authoritative up-to-date version maintained only by those who "know" and can link only to threads of relevance. Read-only to all but admins is imperative.
It isn't an easy task though as is stated for documentation. The quality of the indexing on the FAQ could significantly affect it's success imho. But how many Calibre users actually make it to the forums? And of those, how many read regularly the forum threads? A miniscule % I would suggest. I've been using Calibre maybe 4 months or so ago, yet I still understand very little about the recommended way of doing conversions. Or the wonders of catalogs. Or metadata plugboards. Or sharing as a website. Or news recipes. Or specific issues related to Calibre with a Kindle. I'm sure most users wouldn't have a clue about there being gui plugins. There are so many fundamental things like author sorts, regexes, duplicates, default settings you *will* want to change that I found took weeks at least of trial and error and hours of forum reading to glean.
Is the information here on the forum? Yeah, somewhere at some point in time it probably has been. You may have to pick one of those 80 page threads and hope that what is in the first post has been maintained with all I need to know though
It is an intimidating program after you scratch the surface to discover all it really does. The frustrating thing for me is that I am sure there are ways to be more effective with doing some of the basics - for instance to reduce the time spent in Sigil editing a book which may have been sorted automatically by a Calibre setting. However knowing "where to begin" on some of this stuff particularly when whole new features get added every week can be scary, even for geeks like me just from choosing to not spend every waking hour on trying to understand what Calibre does