It's of course up to you how you call it, but we prefer calling it user friendly and minimalistic, rather than dumbed-down
The goal of a rich text editor, in our opinion, is to make text editing easy for users. Not to perform layout functions (how the text looks should be dictated by your CSS, not inline attributes in like 99% of the cases) or to create widgets like image maps.
There's definitely things from that list that we intend to add (as we've also told you, Michael, in our email conversation, including links to things in that list that you can already do), but indeed, Redactor will
never have three rows of buttons, 9 steps to insert an image because of all the "powerful" features you have to go through, or much more inline styling than we already support. That's just not what we think a rich text editor should be.
Right tool for the right job, and all. As we've also tried to explain via email, for layout functions, we recommend ContentBlocks. That will let you do the more complex stuff (inserting templates and more complex widgets like image maps are easy to handle in ContentBlocks), in a more specialised UI, allowing us to keep the focus of Redactor on editing text. Most of our customers use that combination.
If TinyMCE and its suite of plugins are more appropriate, then go for it. TinyMCE has one of (if not
the) biggest RTE communities out there, so you wont see me hating on it. It's an impressive platform.
Redactor is for the users that need a more intuitive interface, easy uploads (with powerful configuration in the back to organise things automatically so the user doesn't have to worry about that), automatically cleaning up nasty inline and paste styles, and generally a tool that works nicely with the rest of MODX (e.g., it immediately works across the MODX manager, including for third party extras that support RTEs). Redactor is opinionated and has a narrower focus.
For people that need more complexity in their editor than Redactor intends to offer, and ContentBlocks isn't suitable either,
I would recommend
TinyMCE RTE. It has the more recent version of Tiny, looks a lot cleaner than the old Tiny, and works well with third party extras too. We also have a share of customers that use ContentBlocks for layout stuff, but use TinyMCE RTE for the text. Works great, too.
If you want full control over every line of editor code (basically coding your very own custom editor) TinyMCE Wrapper can be an option, but to me it seems too much work for what should be a basic formatting function.
Bottom line, use what is right for you. I think Redactor + ContentBlocks are great for lots of projects, but it's much more important that the tool fits YOUR needs. In Michael's case, Redactor is not the right tool, and that's fine. Luckily, there is choice.
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