I suspect they baked it into their schema and UI too early, and things got to the point where it was too traumatic to change it later. Inertia becomes ever-more-powerful in any system.
And to be fair, it's a convenient simplification. The tension between "easy" and "powerful" is omnipresent, and it's not unreasonable to forsake the power users to make things easier for the masses. I may disagree with the decision, but I can certainly argue that it's a decent compromise. I'm going to have to work pretty hard to make things more sophisticated without it being over-complex.
But this is why I want suggestions like that now: to have as much idea as possible now about where we might want things to go, so I have some idea of how it ought to fit into the overall plan and try to avoid cutting off desireable pathways...
Re: Reading vs. friendship
And to be fair, it's a convenient simplification. The tension between "easy" and "powerful" is omnipresent, and it's not unreasonable to forsake the power users to make things easier for the masses. I may disagree with the decision, but I can certainly argue that it's a decent compromise. I'm going to have to work pretty hard to make things more sophisticated without it being over-complex.
But this is why I want suggestions like that now: to have as much idea as possible now about where we might want things to go, so I have some idea of how it ought to fit into the overall plan and try to avoid cutting off desireable pathways...