Is this the best we can do?
I'm 53 and I've been working with technology all my life, computer systems since the late 70s. And I'm increasingly dissatisfied by what I experience. radio-userland software is a case in point: it works, but it's profoundly too geek-intensive.
What does that mean?
It means that the designers haven't left to the computer what computers do best and leave to the humans what humans do best.
Should a human being have to craft XML? No - that's what a computer should do because the repetitive "by the book" nature of constructing the proper syntax is precisely one of the things that a computer can do and do well.
So why do I have to go through the complete pain of figuring out the right words so I can have the navigation links I want? I suspect because the pressing need to use HTML as an interface gets in the way. If you have to interact with a WEB BROWSER you're going to get a really crappy human interface because it's the wrong tool for the wrong job.
But a web browser was chosen because it's HANDY and because everyone has one, at least if they are going to design a weblog.
So right away the choice of an inappropriate tool "dumbs down" the posibilities in the human-interface interaction. We're stuck with what was designed and built a decade ago which was all about display and some minimal interaction and it's being man-handled into doing a task for which it is patently inadequate.
Come ON people. This is a computer we're using. It has a graphical user interface. The design of radio-userland is essentially the design for a text-only terminal interface. LOOK at it. Isn't this the case? You get windows to type in but you can't drag and drop things into them. Who is responsible for getting the syntax right? You are.
Do we program our computers this way? Not unless we have to. Sure, we still write assembly language. But what we really use are compilers or interpreters to take a higher-level version of what we mean and translate it, the computer doing all the little fiddly-bits, into something pretty useful and reliable. Good optimizing compilers can write some pretty amazing (although definately not human-generated) code. That's what the tool is supposed to do.
So why did the designers of radio-userland go this way? For all the classic geeky reasons, I imagine: control, opaqueness, and the need to be set apart. You can say "platform independent" all you want but the underlying code in radio-userland isn't platform independent. So why not use, say, Java, and write a pretty vanilla application that would STILL be vastly more user-friendly than the current version?
I suspect because it isn't interesting. The real drive for radio-userland are the XML and SOAP internals - that's what the designers want access to. And, I submit, these are things we should never ever see.
Many are involved with the design of projects that use the same kind of technology that is built into this one. If you follow this project as a guide you will make technology that alienates your users. If you think this is GOOD technology then I feel sorry for the folks who have to use the code you write and design.
We have to do BETTER. All the time. Everytime. Otherwise we perpetuate mediocrity and the barely adequate when what we need are brilliant projects that inspire instead of distress.
12:38:17 PM 
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