Hope you feel better soon.
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Iāve done software development, and you typically have far more things to fix than you have time. Yeah, this might be a small thing, but youāve got 50 or 100 small things on your list. So you prioritize. And unfortunately, depending on the code, what appears form the outside to be a small thing just might be a medium or a really big thing. The related problem is that as a system gets older and has absorbed many fixes and changes, it gets kind of spaghetti/rube Goldberg like- hard to understand and complicated to fix simple things. You discover that the product is going a different direction than you anticipated, so your overall design doesnāt quite work any more. So you have to re-engineer everything: now, do you continue to update the existing, or focus entirely on the new, or (usually) some compromise in the middle. So what I look for, is a) is the product moving forward (not looking for everything, but real progress) b) do problems get addressed (big problems more quickly, smaller problems more slowly, no problems hang around āforeverā) c) Is there customer focus, including honesty with the customer community. You can have lots of product evolution, but if itās not what the customers need, itās not helpful. Caveat: cut developers some slack- sometimes they know things they canāt share. If theyāve been honest all along, you can live with this.
Interestingly, vibrant, critical user communities can sound very unhappy and be very critical, but be very happy when they know someone is listening and responding.
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I have a similar impression of much need for change, but here are my initial thoughts:
A default dashboard makes sense, but to me, a dashboard should show me status in an efficient way and perhaps give me access to my most common use case direct controls of the system. This ādashboardā shows me a bunch of mutually overlapping categories of things that I can dive on, but tells me very very little by itself. For example, it tells me the number of things I have connected. Is that really a piece of information Iām interested in looking at very often? Almost never. Perhaps I am interested in knowing if all of my devices are currently connected or if something has unexpectedly ādroppedā. So perhaps a small piece of real estate dedicated to āconnection statusā that indicates āokā or ātroubleā. If itās ātroubleā, I can dive to see what unexpected condition has occurred.
The top third of my screen or so is dedicated to an image. Seems like a pretty big waste of valuable real estate in a dashboard.
It would be ideal if my SmartApps could register status indicators on my dashboard. For example, alert indicators for known conditions of concern like closed but unlocked side garage door for more than 20 minutes. Status indicators for the sensors I choose to put on the dashboard. And so forth.
One can dream. 
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Bob Florian demoed upcoming ādashboard Solution Moduleā enhancements (Iām not sure of the proper name) at the last open Developerās Call (video soon).
Developers currently canāt modify these, but in upcoming release, someday, we can code rich custom pages for the Dashboard.
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What people are wanting here and what youāre referring to is just fundamental good designing for a user: giving them what they need, when they need it, without having to read documentation.
Iāve always felt SmartThings was developer designed; It never felt like it was designed out from the start to have a great experience, and then developed to fit that designāitās always felt like the development was done first, and the design tacked on. And great design isnāt a coat of paint.
And Iām not faulting them for it. Iāve been at development-led companies like that, where things are bootstrapped at the start, and theyāre trying to get a product out quickly. So instead of spending some time and money designing it out right (with a designer), developers are expected to design as they code, and then maybe a guy whoās good at photoshop is brought in later to āpretty it upā. And itās products like this that are the result. Great potential, passionate (and patient) users, great developers, functionalā¦ but just lacking a really great user experience.
Because itās hard to design and develop at the same time, or to design after the development has been fully baked and the big decisions have been made. Great developers arenāt always great designers, because developers are great at realizing edge cases and making something do all it could do, instead of all it should do. And when you put those two things together in a design, you get complicated products.
Iāve gotten by with the way the UI is, but it always annoys me, and in its current state thereās no way Iād recommend it to anyone non-technical. Iād love to redesign it.
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Quite right, Jaff. To me, ST is Linux, maybe ten years ago: You can argue that itās better than anything else out there. A power userās toy par excellence, you can make it do anything you want it to, but only if youāre ready to delve deeply under the hood;. However, if ST ever wants to be embraced by the wide world of people whoāve never needed to deal with a command line and who donāt care to begin now (and yes, thatās almost everyone, folks), they need to show some effort towards optimizing the user experience for those people.
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Wow surprisingly, even today in 2018, almost none of the feature OP requested are here in the current SmartThings appā¦ Amazingā¦ particularly grouping devices(not to be confused with room setup, grouping devices is for controlling multiple devices at once), and the āthingsā page desginā¦
I mean how hard can it be to put a sorting and search function to it? Seriously Samsung?
There is scenes where you can control all devices at the same time.
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Thatās not the same though, and donāt forget scenes can only control lights now. What if I want to control multiple outlets? Grouping is still an effective method to do simple task without creating smart apps and scenes for the setup.
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I agree.
But the greatest thing about SmartThings is itās extensibility.
Search the Forum for the SmartApp āTrendsetterā (actuallyā¦ Iāll link it below). It provides intelligent and powerful light grouping tailored to Community user requests; perhaps better than SmartThings would or will ever implement. We recommend Trend Setter to all ActionTiles users.
Thanks a lot Terry! Iām actually using it 
Just saying native support would he more than welcomed. But yeah trend setter is very robust.
Well I donāt think theyāre doing any enhancement now since a UI overhaul is coming (hopefully in months as they said).
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Never hold your breath. 2 years is also 24 āmonthsā. Thereās no reason to believe SmartThingsās pace of development is going to substantially increase - and for the sake of stability and reliability, it must not be rushed.
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And then equate that into dog years.
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For their record of reliability, Iād rather they stay the way IT IS 
Itās gonna happen! You just donāt know when 