As the reference client, I can sure understand that devs may be reluctant to introduce patches without a lot of testing first. If a released were to introduce some nasty bug, it could quickly create a nice chaos given that most people just run and update the official client without asking themselves many questions (which is understandable, the official client, being "official", is supposed to be stable and running out of the box).
That said:
What? Please listen to yourself. The answer is yes, people can and will take care for themselves.
Using the console for this is good enough to me (it's not as if this was a very frequent operation), but it would be nice though if the client was able to dump encrypted private keys... It's a bit sad that the official client provides a way to encrypt a wallet but no way to decrypt it... (and it doesn't really help switching from one client to another)
1. a list of balance per address
2. from this list, allow to pick one (or optionally several) addresses to spend from
And to avoid clogging the main GUI, it can just be buried somewhere into the menu
That said:
"Addition of Import Private Key Menu" - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2050
Too dangerous for easy access - do you really want to enable people coins from newbies? Power users can already import private keys using the debug console.For something like coin control, parts were merged already, but the GUI wasn't. Well, honestly, if I was maintaining a wallet (I'm not) I wouldn't merge it either. We should be trying to make Bitcoin easier to use and less nerdy, not exposing the guts of the protocol in the UI. Rather I'd want to figure out a list of what people are using the coin control gui for - find a list of use cases then encourage people to implement them in a more direct way. Is this a privacy thing? Is it an accounting thing? Both? Neither? There's probably a better way to solve those problems.
Well, GUI coin control would actually make Bitcoin easier for anyone needing coin control... A basic design which looks useful to me would be:1. a list of balance per address
2. from this list, allow to pick one (or optionally several) addresses to spend from
And to avoid clogging the main GUI, it can just be buried somewhere into the menu