Eloise Pasteur

Whilst I understand and sympathise with each of your comments I have to say I think you've drawn an untenable conclusion. To produce a UI that covers all use cases for Second Life is going to be so close to impossible that I believe you will spend more time chasing that goal than you say you will spend in cross-checking the various ways to access the preferences and making the decisions about what goes where. Not having a system where there's a basic UI and then choices that the user can make to control the fine detail means you are making the choices for us - and even if you get every choice right for me when I'm building, they'll be wrong for the times when I'm shopping or clubbing or in a meeting. You won't win and we as a user base will complain loudly. If you look at Adium, which does, essentially 1 of the many things that SL does, it has 9 different preference panels. By coincidence my first choice browser also has 9 panels. My email client has 11... and so on. Emerald had about 30 with various sub-tabs - and whilst I'm not here to defend the Emerald team, the stats suggests that the residents voted with their feet and learnt their way around all those preference panels quite happily. I wouldn't object to seeing a preference choice for "minimal, intermediate or extensive" preferences where you set the core ones and gradually more and more others. I wouldn't object to seeing a something like the old graphics tab with a small number of choices (2 I think) and a "show more" option approach. But I would really like the ability to control a lot of things so I can make Second Life work the way I want to use it, rather than being forced to try and use it the way you want me to. I don't know how many hours a week you spend in the viewer. It's a rare day I don't spend 3-5 hours actively in Second Life and when things are busy I might be spending 15+ hours a day using it. Having the ability to use it how I want for a good work flow is really important as it is to so many other people - it's just I don't believe that the way I want to have it to work is the way that everyone else does. I know I'm idiosyncratic, now give me back the preferences to let me work my way please and do the same for everyone else.