The aggravating thing about this discussion, is I agree with your conclusion that the show has weak writing with resetting everything.. just none of your reasoning for that specific example. You keep acting like a good UI is just something you can pull off google.. it's not.. at all. There's a reason large companies have entire departments dedicated to just that one thing. Graphic design and usability is a real thing that is VERY important. It wasn't the actual LOOK of the UI that was the problem, they didn't give them a damn DOS prompt without any graphics, ffs. It was that the entire thing was not setup to be user friendly to an average joe at any level from the start.
The basic premise of 'UI redesign costs money, we don't have money, no one will give us money if we don't prove we made a good product already' was one of the few times their writing actually did make sense realistically. They had already established that his great compression was only one part of a successful product. It didn't trump everything else. Richard turning down funding for all kinds of ridiculous reasons is where the lazy writing tended to come in.
No one is saying that sleek intelligent UIs don't cost money. Nobody is saying they couldn't have improved upon the UI once they had money coming in and could afford to do it.
They didn't need an amazing UI for their platform to work, stop pretending that they did. They needed a simple google UI (blank white page with 2-3 buttons on it) for it to be user accessible, period. Then they could of fancied it up with a real UI design team later when they were rolling in fucking dough.
Here's the UI they released:
Here is what they needed:
Really all they needed was a blank white page with 3 buttons on it. "upload"/up arrow Icon, "Library"/media icon, and "Settings"/cog wheel icon.
There was no reason to show the end user how the sausage was made. All they needed was a way to add their media to their pied piper app, a way to view the media already loaded in their pied piper app, and a button to get to a small handful of the settings made available in their full retard UI they actually launched with.
They needed a right click context menu addition when not in the app that said "Add to Pied Piper Library" and they needed another right click context menu addition when viewing files in the library that said "Download for offline use"
There was no reason for the end user to know that the files in his library were super compressed bits and bytes and 99% of the actual files were dispersed across a p2p network with other users of the app. All the end user need to know is that when he uploads shit to his pied piper account on 1 app that shit is available pretty much instantly on any other app he has logged in to Pied Piper/has the pied piper app on. He doesn't need to know he's using up his cell data usage or any of that shit with the p2p shit. All he needs to know that the files on his phone are now shrunk to fuck and he has tons of storage space for other shit and pictures of his cats, and that if he wants to watch movies or whatever on his phone with his pied piper app he needs wifi or cell connection, so he better make the files available for offline viewing before he gets on an airplane or goes out in to the sticks.
They should of called the Network the Super Cloud or the Magic Cloud or some fancy branding Name to denote that shits "in the cloud, but not the regular cloud, the instantly available to you on any device you want with virtually no waiting even for massively large files" cloud.
And that's it. app is instant success.
