OK, I think we need to step back a bit, I'm not particularly comfortable with the tone of this thread in general.
Diamaunt (fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view) had a very close view of watching how this whole sausage-making process was done, and is somewhat naturally protective of me and the work, so I can understand his frustration. There was a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes that the vast bulk of you didn't have to see, but he did - you were presented with a relatively painless installation process that completely hides the technical complexity that got to where we are. Some of you may have even looked at the mechanism we used and it might even seem deceptively simple - however, the path to get to that simplicity was not straight at all, since we had to figure out how to get into the device in the first place. There were a couple of serious show-stoppers that we had to overcome and it wasn't clear several times if we could pull this off.
Even worse, Sony threw us a curve by releasing a firmware update that seriously jeopardized the entire project, and we had to pretty much start over to figure out how to get around that too, which set the schedule back. We've unbricked thousands of dashes over the past couple of weeks.
Just as happened with the chumby relaunch three years ago, this solution is not going to be perfect for everyone. We accept that. What I do want to make sure of is that we're properly setting expectations given the circumstances.
If you've found some other solution that works better for you, please use it with my blessings. I won't be offended.
Sony had several years and lots of people and money to put together the themes you were all using. The "default" theme that a lot of you were using had approximate 2.5MB of Actionscript source code, on top of the Flash graphics. The size of the final theme SWF file is actually larger than the Control Panel itself. It's basically a project of a magnitude comparable to the Control Panel.
As I don't have all those people, or some time-slowing device to pack all that development into just a few months, you will have to be patient, or find some alternative. You may never get exactly what you think you want, and there may be several reasons why that may be the case - not least of which is the economics of the entire chumby ecosystem.
To date, *chumby* subscribers have financed what you're currently using on the dash. There is no nebulous deep pool of venture capital that makes this all work - people like you paid for this. Some of you have donated, and some of you have subscribed, and I truly appreciate that. However, if the plan is to withhold financial support until you get exactly what you want, that's probably not going to work out very well. I have responsibilities to my other chumby users that *are* paying, and frankly, a couple of very important things I was working on for them were put on hold in order to devote all my available time to this project, and they've been extremely understanding about it.
Now that that rant is done, I think we will put together a FAQ that deals more directly with some of these issues, as I think that jhonryan has made some very solid points about that.
In any case, with all of your help, I'd like to keep the conversation civil in keeping with a longstanding tradition of this forum.