Because this is what I do to set up Armory & bitcoin-qt and I really wish it wasn't a 13 step process that takes moving gigabytes of data around and putting arguments in shortcuts.
If you want to run BitcoinQt without arguments you should look at bitcoin.conf. Your installation will be dependent on your /User/AppData folder however. Armory has no .conf and we should remedy that, I agree. We also had internal discussions about possibly adding a GUI feature to relocate the data folders. This is all extra work and not a priority as long as users don't voice their opinion on the matter.
Consider that all these options are available through command line arguments because we prefer the less tech savvy users don't shoot themselves in the foot until we have a strong GUI option (if we ever do that is). Keep in mind that CLI args are really quick to implement, GUI equivalents, not so.
But if you make the customization part easy it can be more convenient, I have a degree in computer science I'm not new to computers I know that if a person wants something to work for them they have to put some work in too, I just think the process could be easier is all I'm saying.
I understand your point entirely, but again there is a time and priority factor, and while this setup process is convoluted, our expert users rarely complain about it, and considering the accessibility, these are expect features. We don't have the man hours to throw at this currently. Maybe I'll abuse the prospect newbie with that stuff (if he signs with us).
Don't get me wrong I'm not playing the blame game here, it was completely my fault. I'm just saying it was a bit shit that I had to start from scratch when something went wrong.
You're stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one. We moved to LMDB so Armory will handle that kind of abuse from 0.93 onward. Core is still using LevelDB and there are no plans to change that.
Another suggestion I have is changing the way the UI displays what it's doing. This "Initialising Bitcoin Engine" with an empty progress bar and a six stage spinning icon* isn't great IMO, more detail into what it's doing and maybe an ETA, something to show me that it hasn't just given up and stopped.
*I'm putting Armory on a VM and I'm currently looking at that, and the spinning icon has actually stopped spinning and I'm pretty sure it's stopped writing data (or reading, who knows what it's doing) as well.
That's a band-aid fix. Ideally nothing should gets stuck, so the ugly progress bars are enough. From the sound of it, your Armory is stuck. If you want to help, gimme details about your VM setup and attach your log files.