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Hi Charlie, good to hear from you again.
You raise some valid concerns. Joe has talked about adding a sort of setup wizard that will guide you through your first time running VDrift, and write your VDrift.config for you, since there are so many options for a first time user it is difficult for new users to play with every option when they first try the game. At this stage I think this is possible, using the menu system the game already has. Maybe some slight modifications will be needed to accommodate the menu making conditional decisions based on the user's input.
The idea of a drift-training mode has also come up before. I don't think it would be terribly difficult to set up. However, a training mode would need a training track, set up specifically for the training steps we want to put the user through. We'll need to think about what kind of things we want the user to learn, and someone will need to build a track based on that.
As for a more arcade-oriented feel, we already have some driving assist options available. Perhaps the setup wizard would help users make better use of these features. What other kinds of driving assistance can we add?
It is true that player retention is important to an open source game project. However the focus of the project has been realism and accuracy first, and usability second (the thinking is that it's easier to make a realistic game usable than it is to make a usable game realistic). When I came to the project I decided to make the game more usable by implementing a more flexible menu system. Maybe it's time we start thinking about usability more heavily again, and not just in the context of user interface, but also gameplay.
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