Well Jon, I don't think everything is rosy, but I do think being positive in the things I can do is the best approach. I think some of us address what we think needs improvement by just seeing to the parts we can see to ourselves, not by laying out what someone else ought to fix.

Maybe it has to do with an innate trust I have that other people are doing that too, many of them, much of the time-- such as Max, making improvements here once he sees the need clearly from his own viewpoint and once a smart enough idea occurs to him.

It reminds me of a program I designed, developed, and ran in a school system. There were some serious wrongs that needed to be addressed, and many of them were longstanding issues arising from societal blind spots. After soliciting everyone's sense of what was needed, it took awhile before I came up with something. But the thing I came up with integrated all of the input, much of it from people who could not tolerate talking to one another but who had laid out their concerns for me as a neutral person. The progam addressed ALL of the issues, and the root causes, in such a fashion that it actually made a difference to the people incvolved and to the system itself.

Yes, something "ought" to have been done sooner about each and every sub-issue, small problem, and individual wrong that as being done... but it just so happened that it was not possible, until it became possible, to do anything within the actual situation involved.

Sometimes you have to be close enough to the situation to know why this or that idea is simply not workable in combination with all the other factors that exist. So you have a choice then-- do as much as one can do with what is already possible, trusting that more will become possible.... or decide that it is NOT workable as it is, and even if it might get better, leave because it is not presently tenable and something else is more effective.

I choose to trust that Max's innate curiosity and drive to create will lead him to keep tinkering away at Mudcat such that it continues to improve. But I find myself less and less patient with people who bail out (not you Jon), while the process of responding to their concerns is occurring, because they do not have the willingness to see that it IS occurring. It is very frustrating to work at designing a solution only to find that by the time you can put it into practice, many of the people you were trying to respond to have bailed out! My music ministry discussion went that way. I lost a lot of hours trying to structure into it what people said they wanted, even tho I didn't want it myself. They had moved on. Oh well. Live and learn.

~Susan