After even a few more years than astrolab spent in development and support activity, for customers, internals or now the public at large I am less pessimistic than you (although I could be a bit cynical too, sometimes).

When we are acting remotely as we do now we only deal with people who have problems that they could not solve by themselves, therefore the proportion of people who have not read the doc, the help, the FAQ, the menus, etc... is obviously higher. But you must not forget or ignore those who have read but could not understand because it was not appropriately worded or organized.
And last, fortunately, you can assume that all the others (the vast majority) are either lucky, or shy, or more probably that they have read what they needed to read, that they understood it, and so, finally, everything is fine for them.

All that to say that we must not give up (and I am glad you don't give up either) and keep trying to improve those parts which are obviously not the most clear for everybody.

And I think the improvements discussed here for WCG profiles would be valuable and would help members to better understand the implications of all these settings in WCG's device profiles:
1. a more clear grouping of settings by scope
2. a clear warning that cross-project settings apply to all projects and that the latest changed set will apply to all projects (grids), wherever the change had been done
3. a clear warning that local settings in the client have precedence on any other corresponding settings from profiles for this machine.

Regarding improvements to the Local Preferences part of BoincMgr I am more uncertain about what they could be and if we have a chance to ever get a satisfactory solution. Until then I will stick to my own rule: use them all always or never as you prefer, but avoid intermediate solutions.

Cheers all! Jean.