Yes, I can completely see that. As anyone who’s had a go at building their own knows only too well, every site and resource has its own quirks, and you can sometimes find yourself tweaking parameter after parameter in vain. Rather than some kind of low-code Lego for commoner configurations, I was primarily thinking of something (comparatively) modest like a GUI front end to the .plist parameter editing. The current text-based version isn’t difficult and I don’t mind it myself (as a 90s throwback who still jumps aboard handcoding opportunities where available), but my kids who never read manuals take one look and just think word-of-the-month Nope.
This is the weird thing about DEVONagent, really. Everyone runs web searches every day of their lives and DA is hands-down the best tool ever devised for this. But even on this forum pre-loaded with DEVONheads, the traffic is minute compared to the bustling community of DTland. Obviously people (myself included) spend their lives in DEVONthink, launching it on startup and living at least partly in it all through the working day, whereas DA is something you fire up for particular tasks. But there’s also something about DA, its never-quite-intuitive-as-it-feels-it-should-be UI, and (above all) the way users have been passively trained by the search-engine business model towards low-effort, low-quality, zero-apparent-cost implementations of internet technology’s single most powerful affordance, that collectively serves as a behavioural deterrent against investing even modest cognitive and budgetary capital in prising the power of internet search away from the systems that have arisen to distort and monetise it at the expense of actual informational quality. As the OP from which this thread has unravelled noted, this is finally now being challenged in ways that DA has been out in front of from the start, and there’s an opportunity here for the world to catch up. But it will need a user base who understand, and care enough about, what internet search actually involves and does – and how we can exploit it, rather than vice-versa.