[Gimp-user] Weird forum and layout

[Boxman <forums gimpusers com>]

Man, I'm having trouble understanding the layout of this website and forums, as
well as the design philosophy behind GIMP user interface.
For starters, on the home page its hard to tell what the content is when so much
of it looks like advertisements. Then, on the forums, only bits and pieces of
them are shown. I don't see any display of the overall listing of posts and
responses as we get with other forums. Although I found a longer list of just
post topics, most of them were labled as awaiting moderator approval. Not much
help.

Even in making this post, I got confused at the lack of a "post" button.
Instead, there is a captcha box that looks like an ad directly above a real ad
that has
TWO captcha words in it. Which one am I to use? Took me 4 tries to get it right,
not knowing whether they were case sensitive. Then, outside the box, in tiny
letters is a button "create discussion,"

What I am saying is that it is so radically different that I find it very hard
to use. There must be some point behind the design of layout, but I'm not
getting it. Like GIMP itself, I don't understand why the developers would want
to create something so different from what we are familiar with, and have
invested huge amounts of time learning, so that to use GIMP we now have to
relearn everything we  thought we knew. This situation is really giving me
second thoughts about whether I want to go through with this steep re-education
curve unless there is some great benefit here that I fail to understand.

While I appreciate the huge voluntary effort that made in creating a free app,
and it is not my intention to take anything away from that, I just can't
comprehend why it was done the way it was. It seems to me its radical
differences won't do much to attract new users.

-- 
Boxman (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)