Future direction (and a rant).

[Matt.Wilkie]

>Anyway, what are people's thoughts?

This probably goes without saying, but I'll be pedantic 
anyway. :) Command lines and scriptability are very 
important and should not be sacrificed to the gods of
so-called user friendliness and learnability. 

On the other hand, I haven't been able to get much into
grass yet because of the lack of a good browsing or 
data viewing interface (my primary GIS tools are MapInfo
Arc* and Pamap), as well as time of course. :) So I agree
with the gist of your message.

The AutoCAD combined gui-cli interface works well and 
would be a good model to study. I've always wondered 
why it wasn't adopted by more programs. I've not used 
Blender, but a lot of users absolutely love it's interface
and the descriptions I've heard are appealing. We don't
have ArcInfo v8 yet but I hear they have a good 
combination of point'n'click and scriptability. When it
arrives I'm willing to spend some time discussing/comparing
it's interface with those working on grass-guis.

>Does anyone really care?

Yes.

-matt