Quote from: Gabi on December 21, 2011, 02:50:10 PM

The problem is, the bitcoin client SUCKS. It sucked 6 months ago, it sucks even more today with version 5 (congratulations, you managed to make it suckier... the impossible made possible)

Dude. You are out of line. It is clear you dislike the changes, but you should be humble and grateful. The client is a gift from the developers to you. Oh, you have some suggestions? Great. Share your opinions.

Quote from: Gavin Andresen on December 21, 2011, 03:52:40 PM

I think 90-something-percent of future Bitcoin users will be using it on an iPad or mobile phone or on their computer in a web browser.

This may be true, but it is not the dumb-device network-edge masses that drive innovation. I believe you are a Linux user and are therefor familiar with the fiasco of Unity and Gnome 3 Shell? While building an UI that caters to the masses is important, alienating the power users is project revolt and stagnation. However, I don't see any radical UI changes from 4 to 5 and I look forward to new the new features in 6 and beyond. All in all, I'm happy with the direction of the reference and alternate clients.

Quote from: Pieter Wuille on December 23, 2011, 03:10:46 PM

The current client hides many things from the user, which is probably a good thing for many people, but the fact that it hides the wallet concept completely creates confusion.

Yes! There are many concepts that are difficult to grasp. But by assuming they are ungraspable we guarantee that users remain stupid. While this problem will solve itself with new clients, I believe the client evolution has been a bit backwards. The client could have been more transparent, modular, and simpler and we would have learned much from the experimentation and even mistakes of early adopters who are typically quite tech-savvy. But I believe that's the past. The code is getting cleaner, there are several libraries, alt clients, and web services available or in development. The future is bright!