RT's development is chaotic, unplanned and uncontrolled, Michael, and it really is a problem. More functionality gets shoe-horned in at every turn, while there's no obvious rhyme or reason to bug-fixing, consolidation or the bedding-in of stable builds/designs - no practical version control that I can see (I keep a regular eye on the
Google Code issues list) - and the documentation is desperately out of date as a consequence.
I don't mean to offend, Michael - I've huge respect and affection for many involved in RT - but I've been on the RT forum for years now (although you may have noticed I'm no longer active there), I've seen how RT has developed over the years, and -
as a "typical" longstanding and very experienced end user - I have to tell you that it's not remotely the application that it could be, or indeed needs to be.
What it is, is shambolic. I've tried on numerous occasions to make these points, but have been dismissed out of hand because I'm not a dev (even though, as I've been saying for a long time now, development which is controlled only by devs is a recipe for exactly the kind of mess RT is currently in) so I've given up - both on trying to make these points stick on the RT forum, and on the software itself - because these days it's pretty much the poster child of poor design.
Usability
matters, and RT is desperately lacking in that regard - it's approaching
Photivo in terms of confusing complexity, but at least Photivo is quite up-front about its "steep learning curve", whereas RT aspires to a degree of user-friendliness and - to quote
the website - "efficiency", that it simply doesn't deliver on.
And the problem is nothing to do with maximising limited resources, Michael - indeed, more control and more formal planning would allow for those limited resources to be used far more effectively and efficiently than they're being used now, where devs are lurching from task to task in an apparently random way, and dealing with what they
feel like doing: even in an open source project that's no way to do things, as I've said all along.