@dmcd
I totally agree with what your saying, and actually tried to bring it up in the forum too, when I first arrived here, as do many others
Even suggested a small redesign with most of the advanced options kept away in an Advanced tab/section. and the rest be made more simple.
But there are a lot of advanced users / programmers on this forum, and I imagine its difficult for them to see that having (*)\)) etc in the search for example is out of the ordinary. see nothing wrong with having python script visible when making a user column or custom search etc
There is a reason there are many posts about a more simplistic user interface, and weekly posts about people not being able to display Author - Title in the way they want, or why there are numbers after the folder names, and why when Calibre pops up around the web, it gets reviews as very good but with a poor/complicated interface.
I wish you luck if you intend to try and help with the cleanup of the interface, I'm just going to sit over there, as I can see it being really frustrating, and I'm too old
