Rob,

you might notice that neither Sebastian nor myself are member of the core. Sebastian is team lead of the udt module, I am a normal member of his team. We are working on our module trying to get the best result for our users. As an ex-manager you might be surprised how much time we volunteer in this project.

We discuss a lot about new features. We want to get sure that they make sense, even years later. Each feature needs to be supported over the time as we don't want to break any installation during update.

We are listing to our users. The list feature has been requested even before the current team was founded, as you can see inside Gemini. So we discussed this issue. One of the major downsides of Lists is that they are not under the control of any user on portal level, it can only be maintained by host. 

Now going further: consider we would support Lists. Supporting Lists means encouraging people in using this feature. As we are knowing our users we can imagine the increase in support requests asking how to alter these values or how to localize them. This was never the purpose of Lists, they contain host settings. So Lists are not useful for UDT.

Instead we introduced a realy simple solution, values separated with an semicolon. We know some people who are enhanceing these features on their own, for example they take other UDTs as source for their list. We love and encourage in people doing that.

So we leave Lists as they are, we are not interested at all in working on it as we are not interested in these host settings. Note that we don't say Lists are rotten or the worst thing ever. Lists are an old core feature that had seen better days. I am not aware of any new development that is build on top of Lists. You will even not find any documentation proposing that.

Sometimes we have got really serious core related issues. We need enhancements inside the DNN Core, sometimes bug fixes etc. So UDT was the first dnn module that added their own custom permissions to the permissions grid inside settings. It took 3-4 months to get these fixes into the core, and things like this are the reason why a lot of the newer UDT releases don't run on older dnn installations.

So improving modules will also effect the core itself. We are working hard together with the core team on getting better and better.

Core team itself, and especialy the board of directors and the trustees are running a different job. They are working on the improvement of the whole framework. Often it is just bug fixing, but most time they work hard in lifting the platform on a higher level.