MediaPortal never was, and I hope will never be for the common noob who's not willing to take on a learning curve. Case in point, MacOS, it's so set up and easy to use, it's literally been neutered in functionality to make it nice and easy to use. Now this may no longer be true with MacOS X and above, but I haven't gotten a chance to play with them. The point is, MP has so much power because it can be customized in literally millions of diffrent ways. With a day or so's worth of work t\weaking settings, finding plugins, getting all the plugins to work together in harmony with 1 skin, it's all worth it to then just be able to sit back and enjoy because the MP setup you made is EXACTLY what you wanted, not what some dev decided it should work and feel like.
This is an oft talked about point in software development. Thing is, if the only way to configure/setup MP is like you explained above, it would never appeal to the wider community. Only a small section of the community enjoy fiddling with every tiny setting in MP; most don't.
I'm not advocating for scrapping of the MP configuration app. What I am gunning for is a better wizard that allows for a quick 5 minute setup. If they want to further configure MP, then by all means, go check out the MP configuration app. That wizard has to be updated with the new features of MP, but the devs also have to be smart enough to know what should be in the wizard and what should not. That's the hardest part.
As for a feature freeze, I think there should be one before each release. MP is not a web app, you can't update it whenever you feel like it. Each release has to be as polished as possible to make a good impression on the user. That said, MP still has its beta status attached, and it hasn't reached the gold 1.0 release yet.
