First off, the overall look and feel of DNN appears more professional and clean. My hat is off to the designers and front-end guys at DNN Corp.
But...
As a UX professional I have a few complaints:
1) The use of the word Modules for previous DNN implementations has somehow now replaced the term Container, which we use across the DNN industry. So this was a strange oversight. Now anyone trying to find out how to install a module or extension on Google or Bing will get misdirected to installing a "module" on a webpage, let alone how confusing it is to see the same Container term for skins still in use for DNN 6. (Note: This user-experience wasted an hour of my time trying to figure out how to install my first module.) Not a great win. It was a fail.
2) The default setting of COMMON while installing a "Container/ Module" is rather unusual. This is a fail. Why not just keep track of last entry change and make it stick as a rule? Sloppy design = Fail. Now we are going to call these officially "Extensions", but not one product I saw on snowcovered uses this taxonomy. It just seems like some arrogant manager at DNN forced this move. So us DNN4-5 community members must now use both terms if we are talking about different versions of DNN? This is a big fail.
3) Purchased Extensions: The inclusion of copyright protection schemes is a big fail to this user. Do you realize users with Internet Download Manager or any firewall that analyzes downloads will not be able to install to DNN 6 automatically? Why should we now have to forsake all our anti-virus, anti-malware download analyzers and .or internet download managers just to install a module automatically from Snowcovered? What happens to the other vendors who sell DNN modules directly from their websites? Complete fail here. You could have created a small ajax downloader, yet you opted for the basic fallback of using the Client Browser for installing to websites? This is a fail. Let alone the utter annoyance of having to Fetch list of extensions each time I want to add a new one. Rather annoying when you have a large list of "MODULES" to download from snowcovered... funny how the name isn't universal and can be rather confusing? Rather annoying actually due to #1 above.
4) Not including a manual for DNN 6? Big fail. You have a link on documentation on the main page of a fresh DNN 6, and when you go there, it is just DNN 5.x material? Big big fail for pushing this out to the user community without a manual.
Otherwise it has soe nice very aesthetic features, but you need to focus on proper Information Architecture. A lot of content and taxonomy is misplaced and hard to find and without any documentation around, the product is not an improvement over DNN 5 by any stretch of the imagination.
It is not wise to implement DNN 6 and have us developers and designers find ways to jailbreak DNN 6 due to this tight relationship you seem to have with a DNN "MODULE" vendor, snowcovered. Great vendor, but why lock us in this hardcore? Microsoft or Oracle or the LAMP community ever forcced us to buy from their website only. It seems very greedy and is really aggravating to see DNN sell itself short in this manner. DNN is not some Console video game system with a locked in supplier is it? It was supposed to be open source, that was the big selling point from DNN 3-5.x
I will just await the Jailbreak version of DNN 6 to bypass this silly locked in vendor relationship DNN 6 has with Snowcovered.
Once all the above are corrected, I will start using it. I am just glad I didn't haphazardly trust DNN 6 when I saw some frustrated users wondering how to do basic things and no one would answer them in these forums.
Sorry to give DNN 6 a big thumbs down.