"what might lead to a better moodle UI is examining it's mission. Who is it supposed to serve?"
My answer to this is, most important first:
- Learners. We are trying to provide learners with effective and engaging educational experiences.
- Teachers. In our cultures, the design of the educational experience the student gets is directly defined and confgured by people who go by a varienty of names but let us calle them teachers.
- Others. These include techical and institutional administrators, support staff, regulators, examiners, ...
So, I think your three suggestions all relate to some of the least important users, although they are far from un-important.
Comparing the student experience of the quiz between 1.5 (when I became quiz maintainer) and where we are now, think we have come a long way.
For teachers, I think they have suffered, because we have added features that make it possible for teachers to create a much richer range of experiences for students, which has necessarily greatly increased the range of configuration options, and hence the complexity of the UI. The time has come do do something about that.
My rather idealised list of who we are supposed to serve is counteracted somewhat by reality. What I mean is that if you look at the people who engage in this forum, and in the bug tracker, you will see a lot of adminstrators and developers, some teachers, and almost no students.
Therefore, the wish-list requiests we are most likely to hear directly come from admins, and teacher. Of course, admins will request things on behalf of their teacher and students. Teachers will request things on behalf of their students, and so the full picutre is reasonably balanced.
None-the-less, a lot of things that get done do make life easier for adminstrators.
If you want to read more of what I have written about this in the past, see http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Goals_of_an_online_assessment_system
