@ukkoss_project: do your project. Assuming that you are academically honest and justify your findings with evidence (and I have every reason to believe you will be and will do), then the findings will be interesting and will be used as we go forward.
I have done a fair amount of calibre development (person-years), and I can say with certainty that the combination of a) functionality I want, b) functionality other people want, c) capabilities of the cross-platform tool kit, d) time I have to spend do development, and e) interest I have in the problem; all play a significant role in what I do. I am certainly willing to add information from your project to the mix, but it would be one factor out of many.
Another issue that you will face in this project: calibre has a *huge* installed base. According to calibre's statistics page (
http://status.calibre-ebook.com/) there are 3.5 million current users spread across a lot of countries. A large number of these users will be unhappy if anything changes because then they must spend brain cycles to work out how to do something they knew how to do before. They don't care that it might be easier for some unknown new person. (To give a personal example, I have refused to upgrade MS Word beyond 2003 because I detest the ribbon.) These calibre users can be vocal and sometimes hostile. You will need to be rather thick skinned, ignoring the hostility and concentrating on evidence-based recommendations.
Good luck!
Charles Haley, PhD
(retired) Lecturer in Computing at The Open University, UK