@jackie_w, it's a hard question. It appears that just loading the shadow Avenir with Cyrillic support will be enough to improve the look of the book list once the font is loaded by Kobo, no patch needed (I commented out the Avenir replacement line in my last round). Doing just that should be well within the abilities of even a non-techie. So now we're down to neat freaks. Thinking about myself I'd definitely like to have this customization ability, but how many others are like that I don't know. From my hanging around the Russian-language eReader forum (now seemingly defunct) my recollection is that most of them were much more interested in how to make the Coolreader work than how to make nickel play nice with Cyrillic.
Myself I can't imagine using Kobo without patches no matter which language I'm reading in
But for Russian you would definitely want to at least get the keyboard patch, so you have to get technical enough to be able to run the patcher, and then it seems (to me at least) almost a no-brainer that you'd want your book list to look exactly the way you like it and not just not suck if there's such an option. Plus the patch itself looks like a universal one… (famous last words, I'm sure).
To summarize all this rambling:
- Get the Avenir Next with Cyrillic support onto your Kobo
- See if you like the book list well enough
- If not, proceed with the patch to customize as you see fit