These progress reports can be read at two levels. I try to put in some information in that can be understood by everyone, but a lot of the content is aimed at other Hive programming groups, so they are aware of where we're at now, and what features will likely be available in the near term for their use.
Some of the things we're doing now do impact new users (e.g. optimized API calls make for more responsive user interfaces), and will sometimes even impact the user-friendliness. But user-friendliness is mostly a function of front end apps. When the BlockTrades team does front end work, we usually do it on condenser (hive.blog). There's also a couple other devs that work on that (most notably @quochuy). We didn't do any work on condenser this last week, although you can find work we've done in previous reports.
I am working on hiring some new frontend developers and later re-tasking some of our existing frontend devs to Hive work (once they free up from current projects).
Much of our current work has been focused on enabling Hive to scale to large numbers of users without requiring prohibitive cost and enabling other programming groups to execute on their own plans for new 2nd layer Hive apps. Both of these will also have important impacts on user experience in the long run.
I hear ya, I was being little sarcastic. When it comes to explaining the ins and outs of Hive to someone it gets pretty confusing.