I think this one is a very bad problem in Blender’s UI. You should not be able to add values to the areas where the values do nothing. Right?
Sometimes you have activated a setting that disables multiple settings from around the interface. Now you might still test changing those values without any effect to the project. And you think that “ok” this don’t work.
Then you later change that “root” setting back. Now so many things happen at the same time because you have changed those settings which did not do anything, but now they do. And you need to hunt those settings around because you, of course, wanna make the settings back to good, but with that root setting.
A good example of this is the “real camera 2” addon. http://www.3d-wolf.com/camera.html If it could disable the Blender camera settings which can’t be used with the addon, then using the addon would be a lot easier without any random confusion. You try to change the settings with the same information, like “F-stop” but if you change the “wrong” F-stop. Then nothing happens. Then you disable the real camera and you kind of have messed up all the settings without seeing anything in the viewport.
It’s not only a UI problem, you should be aware of what you do and it becomes a problem when you stop being aware of your own actions - in that case no setting arrangement can help. I am not saying this only to laugh at you or something - I am really serious. I know how this happens. You need to know what you are doing at all times and keep track of it - it’s hard to work any other way.
It’s not uncommon for addons to be imperfect in some ways. They are often written by the artists using Blender because they needed some functionality. In a lot of cases they are not programmers nor UI designers and share their work FOR FREE in hope it might be useful for someone else struggling with the same issues they had. I think it would be healthy to think of most Blender addons as a privilege that is given to you, not as something that must fulfill all your needs. In some cases even if it’s a paid add-on it’s not some greedy evil global corporation that is behind it waiting to squeeze all the possible profit out of you, but a single artist who spent hundreds of his free from work hours on it and now would like to get something in return. I am just saying, if you want some amazing functionality from a free add-on, you might consider thinking of the problems there as of ‘possible areas of improvement’ as opposed to ‘very bad problems in Blender’s UI’
You are right, but the visual feedback is very important thing for graphical artists. If it does nothing, then you test another thing. But if the button is disabled, then you know, that you should not touch that. You start right away looking for answers of why it is disabled. And here I think is the root of the problem in this case. The addon just made me write this topic, but there are also other places in Blender where a setting can do this, even without addons. It would save you some clicks and random fooling around in the UI if we had this behavior.
We currently have a misleading information in the UI.
I cannot think of many though. I think Auto Smooth in object data properties tab does not work when an object is flat shaded, but then you can have multiple objects selected and alt+drag the value to change all of them, what if some are flat some are smooth shaded?.. I cannot think of anything else. What else is there?
