[waldfee]

Useful spending of that money would be UX issues, making the horror that is using this stuff bearable.

Usability is atrocious and if you do not use it all the time you have to google the simplest things (for which the results are mostly outdated or wrong or bad practice so you have to be careful with which explanation you follow) which the software itself could explain to you.

[nickpsecurity]

"Useful spending of that money would be UX issues, making the horror that is using this stuff bearable."

100%. Freeze all work on crypto except for fixes for new problems that show up. All rest of money goes to hiring a UX expert for a design that anyone can pick up for common case and then implementing it.

[confounded]

An alternative might just be to expose more of the underlying functionality via non-interactive interfaces, to encourage third-party/FOSS simplified interfaces for specific tasks.

Even trying to use a bash script to automate things is tricky because of gpg2's interactivity. I'm sure it was put there to improve usability, of course :) (which it does, in the interactive case).

[cJ0th]

I'd generally agree. Although I think this is rather something the people behind Enigmail should figure out. The vast majority of gpg users will never interact with it over the terminal, probably.

[waldfee]

You're right. Not only GnuPG but everything around it (mostly email clients) are in dire need of a UX overhaul.

Presenting such a complicated technical topic only in it's purely technical form is not enough imho. Clear and concise explanation for each and every action and item that gets displayed (and the whys!) would do wonders.