Hi Leander,
As the community manager here, I just wanted to point out a couple of things. Some of your bullet points will need to be addressed by our product team - and I promise you that they will be shortly. For the stuff I can answer...
1. HQU is intended to make life easier for sysadmin types, by making data accessible to any scripting language that can grok curl, wget, or their equivalents. If you can make perl, python or php parse XML, then you can go very far with HQU plugins. You are correct that there needs to be more stuff added to be completely usable by sysadmins, and we are definitely working on that. The event center is just one example, and there are many more on the way. For the HQU plugins that have already been added, accessing the data returned by them is pretty easy - much easier than before.
2. Ironically, HQU will actually help to solve your point about consolidated menus and navigation
3. a new auto-discovery can be automatically kickstarted by removing the data directory from your agent. Not the most elegant solution, to be sure, but better than manual DB queries. Have you tried to manually perform an auto-discovery via the tools menu in the platform view?
4. We are definitely adding more product plugins as we go along. Do you have any specific requests?
5. speed and performance have improved dramatically, but I guess not fast enough?
We will make sure that these items are logged, but for some of them, more details would be good. I'm assuming you've logged those elsewhere? We do need detailed bug reports and feature requests.
As I mentioned, our product manager will be stopping by, but I wanted to respond to you in the meantime. This sort of information and feedback is crucial, and we thrive on it. Thank you for taking the time to write it up.
Thanks!
John Mark