After spending several months convincing a few friends to use Riot, the ongoing fiasco with E2E has caused all of them to leave within a couple of days. Obviously they're unlikely to ever come back.

It's a real shame. These are technical people who don't particularly mind verifying a key by hand. In fact I personally even prefer it.

The problem is not only that certain things are not done automatically, but that the UI is designed to make it difficult to do them even manually!

E.g., I have one device 'foo' which you already trust. I add a new device 'bar'. Why on earth would you want to verify its key manually when I could just send you the new key from 'foo' which you already trust?

Even worse, the key for 'bar' is not straightforwardly available anywhere in the UI on device 'foo'. It should be easily viewable in the right hand pane where the list of devices is, but it's not. The only way to get the device ID and key is to send a message from 'bar' to 'foo' and view the details of the message. Why?