I understand what you are saying. But the average person should not have to wait for custom made stuff from the commuinity to use a product like they want. Custom made stuff should be optinal not manditory.
The only thing I don't like about HL is the lack of custominzation with the character sheet. I have seen cheaper character programs with better options for sheets. I expected more from a professional company. The people that pay for the product should not have to do the companies work for them.
Everyone has their own opinion on what we SHOULD focus our energies on next. The reality is that we simply can't do everything as quickly as everyone wants, so we have to prioritize things. At that point, we have to decide what to add now and what to defer until later, so it's a given that someone is going to be unhappy with our choices. Some folks are simply not going to get the features they want, and there's nothing we can do about that.
Our primary objective is to satisfy the largest percentage of users first. When we've asked users over the years whether they would rather have us focus on getting all the crunch into place or make things pretty, they have overwhelmingly voted for the crunch. Consequently, that's where we end up focusing our energies - much to the chagrin of those who feel differently.
The character sheet output is functional. Is it great? Nope, and we're the first to admit it. However, it is functional. So then we have to compare making the character sheets super spiffy versus the options of developing a native Mac version, keeping up with the deluge of Pathfinder content, adding support for a huge game like Shadowrun, and a host of other projects. The majority of users keep telling us that they want one of those other things more than custom character sheets, and we have to listen to that.
However, we didn't want to completely abandon the custom character sheet output idea. So we gave it some thought and came up with what we felt was a good compromise solution. There are dozens of people out there creating their own custom spreadsheets for RPGs. The work involved in doing that is vastly more complex and intensive than writing some XSLT code. So we figured that there would be a fair number of Hero Lab users who would be thrilled to dive in and create their own custom sheets if we made that possible using standards like XSL.
We realize that customizable output that any user can play with is what some users want. The reality is that adding that capability would entail MONTHS of work. That would have meant abandoning one of the other big projects we're working on that are wanted by vastly more users. So it simply wasn't prudent, unless we wanted to disappoint an even larger number of our users.
At this point, there are at least a handful of users I know of who are already embarked on creating their own custom sheet output, and it's only been two days since we released V3.7. Before decrying our approach as wrong, give it a chance to see what comes of it. If we're right, then there will be a variety of custom character sheet options available for Pathfinder (and other games) this summer, and the vast majority of users will be happily using one of those options. Hopefully, one of those options will even work well for you.
