I agree that it's in Larian's best interest to improve the editor as much as they can within the next few months, which I think is part of what they're working on. That said, it's hard to make something so complex become simple. They need a serious user experience expert to come in and rework some things. Some things need to be integrated into the editor that just use text files at the moment (afaik), like treasure tables and character stats and stuff like that. The more stuff you have to do outside of the editor, the less appealing the editor is itself.
I never used the NWN editor, and though I did play that game a decent amount, frankly I never found all that many good modules. But I think comparing NWN and Divinity editors is hard, at least for visual things, because Divinity is far and away better looking, and when a game has much more visual potential, it's a lot harder to just throw a few objects into a prefabbed room and call it a day. Sure, more prefabs would be nice, but I don't think that would help that much, and modules would just look more generic.
To a certain degree, having a medium-high learning curve isn't all that bad, because then it means you only have people who are reasonably dedicated making modules. If people aren't willing to spend some time learning the editor, honestly they're probably not going to produce a very good module. That's not to say that the editor shouldn't be made easier to use, but just to show that learning curves aren't always bad. There was a massive number of garbage modules I filtered through for NWN, but I think for Divinity we're going to have a smaller but higher quality selection in general.
Back to what Larian could do though: release many more official tutorials with some better production and foresight than the previous ones. The other ones weren't bad, but with a little editing and a few clearer explanations, things would be a lot better. I'm thinking like in the atmosphere video when the guy talks about region triggers and how they have to do with the fog of war that eats away. As far as I can tell, they don't have anything to do with the fog of war, but with making it so you can't see other areas at all. That's a little thing of course, but there's lots of those kind of things that add up and make the videos a little less helpful overall.
There also needs to be some documentation in the editor itself that explains the purpose of sliders and functions and the like. And more tooltips would be nice. Unfortunately, for actual changes, the longer Larian waits, the more annoying it's going to be for experienced users to have to relearn stuff, unless it's just a snap and makes total sense. That's just a small little issue.
