I hate to complain. I really do. I have loved RocketTheme for so long and have almost never posted or ask for anything until recently. I am not really sure if this is the right place to post this. It says General Discussion so, I went for it.

I had originally posted a scathing "bye felicia" post but felt it was childish so I replaced with the sarcasm and went back to work.

I have never experienced a learning curve and Honestly, I get it. I don't particularly like the bloat that has happened to Joomla, RocketTheme and everything around us. Even Wordpress walks around snorting up processor and memory like it is CNN.com serving important fake news.

Yes, I understand that YAML, SCSS, LESS and all the other libraries help create a much more powerful system, exponentially so when compared to the size of the bloat. I realize it adds all this amazing function like overriding, updating, etc.

What I don't understand is why in Gantry 4 it was so much easier to do things like, you know, Hyperlink. Seeing as the web is nothing but a gigantic collection of artsy hyperlinks, it would seem something has happened and it's mostly just artsy with very little links.

Now that we have particles, it seems that you have to go from this tab to that tab to this popup to that popup just to set a title, text and link and chances are the links are not going to look, feel or be anywhere near where you want them if there are linking functions at all. I feel like I am in a bad episode of "Dude where is my car", instead it's where is my hyperlinking capabilities. Then add in the fact that now that nice little standard layout that RocketTheme brought to Joomla is completely gone. A Template is no longer a collection of commonsense layouts and adjustment tools with really snazzy dependable modules but now it is a cluster of completely way too many layers of complexity in options for layouts and modules, particles, positions, assigned styles, etc. I can tell you there is no way these templates are that drastically differente from each other to justify the 10 different styles a template ships with and the corresponding layout adjustments.

Then what about how Modules can load Particles and Layouts can override Modules to load Particles, Great... I get it but why is that particles work differently depending on how you load them? Why is it Modules that used to work fine now have little issues here and there depending on where you load them. My guess, there was a variation, specific css or something missed in one of the many layered popups or tabs in the different styles withnin the RocketLauncher templates.

Man. I get it. I really do. But wow! Seriously. My "custom.scss" is almost big enough to just toss in a bootstrap editor and a few php calls from one of the php frameworks and have an entirely new and easily unique site.

So my issues may be that I looked at Sienna and tried to roll out a site with, then I tried to roll out a site with almost every other gantry 5 template. Yeah it worked. Kinda. All the fancy artsy stuff has very little function outside of EXACTLY as it shipped. I know it sounds nostalgic to yearn for those days of thirty clicks and your done but now I am hitting 30 clicks just to load 6 images into an imagegrid, and coding two pages of overrides after I spent 2 hours searching the forums to find the answer to how to change the imagegrid to have hyperlinks instead of lightbox. Amazing considering most of the posts I found ended with a moderator saying, "email me" or "post your private info" then the answer was never posted in that thread! So when I did find it, thinking surely it's something easy in all this overriding capabilities and preprocessors.... nope it would have been easier if I had just read the code and figured it out myself.

Used to be that every module, every thing, every layout presentation had the basic abilities to have links, be resized, be moved from one area of the layout or another. Yes, there would be the occassional "wow look at this" thing that was hard coded or specifically worked only because of some custom CSS specific to that position, to that module, to the layout, to that style. But wow, nothing works now without some form of custom.scss, almost nothing.

I know this sounds like a complaint, and it is, but I really want to know. I am the only one? Is this growing pains? Are future templates going to work out these issues before they are released? Do you guys even consider these issues?

I just want to enjoy the system and manage some content. I can code but that was not supposed to be the point of all this, was it?

Hope you guys can overlook my aggravation and fill me in.

Thanks!
Derek