Then, when something does go wrong, the fanbois jump all over the poster claiming that he/she clearly didn't know what they were doing and deserved to lose their data.
I don't think that is a very accurate depiction of the situation. I don't recall ever seeing anyone say they deserved to loose data, but there is often nothing we can do to help.
At this point they seem to be more focused on the API and middleware than the UI.
They had to rework the middle-ware to make the system able to have a new UI dropped on top of it.
I know Ill be on 11.1U6 until 11.2U2+ or perhaps even 11.3 as the new underpinnings are not worth the switch for me.
It might be ready to use by 11.2-U1, but the big improvement is not just the UI and middle-ware, it is the change to the newer 'supported' version of FreeBSD.
Then fork a new project and call it FreeHost or HomeNAS or something with none of the SAN related stuff and all of the plugins, vms, jails, etc...
Please take a couple minutes to read this as it will hopefully explain why they can't do that:
https://www.xigmanas.com/wiki/doku.php
... and that should be the signal that there was improvement potential.... which arguably should have led to development... which would have resulted in a wizard that did help newcomers set up a basic NAS. But that requires resources, which are limited by scale.
Please keep in mind that the solutions of the forum are not a reflection on iXsystems and the developers of FreeNAS. They provide the forum so the community can help each other. On some rare occasions, very few and far between, an actual staff member from iXsystems will interject, but that is not the norm. We have very little reason to think that they ever read our posts.
The problem (my opinion) with the wizard was that it asked questions that many 'first time' / 'home users' had no idea how to answer and that just lead to confusion and incorrect configuration. The 'solution' was to give a brief tutorial for how to setup a system that would work, without needing to answer those questions. Exiting the wizard was the first step to that. A better wizard might have been a solution, but advanced users didn't want a wizard and new users (by this point) already have the community created guides to work from.
They asked for feedback and I gave it.
I hope they will listen because there is a wealth of knowledge among the members of the forum.
I also don't understand your complaint re: helping newbies that got themselves into a pickle. Presumably, your participation here is entirely voluntary, so if it bothers you to answer such posts, why are you looking at them?
We do want to help. It just gets a little frustrating to answer questions that have been asked so many times before and it is often almost an identical question. Try a search for something like 'unlock volume' and see how many responses there are, and that isn't even a common error. If we didn't want to help (on some level) we wouldn't be here helping. I guess it is like going to the beach. It is enjoyable, but you still end up with sand in places you didn't want it.
Nothing against you, but I have a general dislike for acronyms.
https://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/definition/managed-service-provider
Where I work, it is actually a policy that if you use an acronym, because we have so many, you MUST cite the meaning of the acronym the first time you use it in a document and provide a lookup table at the end of the document. I worked on an update to documentation once where the table of acronyms was over two pages long.
However to be idot proof for every n00b... Well, this is just the wrong product.
There really is no way to make it idiot proof because people are always coming out of the woodwork wanting to run it on an old i7 or Core 2 from ten years ago where the system is running DDR2 memory and then they will want to connect the storage drives by USB (not just the boot drive) and after they have it built and it isn't working properly, then they come here and start asking questions about why the drives keep faulting and it takes six messages in the tread before you are able to dig enough details about their system out to figure out the data drives are connected by a USB hub to a Intel NUC with an i5 CPU and 4GB of system memory. Sorry, true story...
On that note, I would prefer to see FreeNAS/TrueNAS to be more IT professional oriented.
If they did that, I don't imagine it would be free.
Sorry n00bs, go buy a Synology.
I wouldn't wish that on my enemy. At least send them to QNAP. FreeNAS is not for everyone, I agree, but it is not so complicated that someone willing to read some documentation can't be successful with it. That appears to be a problem with society though, and out of scope for this forum, many people refuse to reference documentation, even a little, even when they realize they don't know what they are doing.
I thought this was a GUI suggestions thread?
It is. This is just discussion around the philosophy of the GUI.