MapTools has the ability via something called MacroPolicebox to input dnd4e files that have been hit with detail adder. So that shouldn't be impossible (forever) and I think something kin to it is planned for foundry (cross fingers).
The Roll20 FAQ/how to documents are horrendous, I can't remember what I was trying to do, but I do know that google was better than the actual Roll20 help documents. We don't use everything in Roll20, I have no idea how to use the character sheets in it, instead we use dndbeyond for all of that. Using Roll20 has definitely been a learning experience.
I mean it was never going to solve the community based problems, but it did solve most of the mechanical problems that I kept hearing throughout 4e. primarily, it broadened the gameplay of 4e to accommodate more player preferences.
The hard truth is that good UX is HARD, and it costs money, and the RPG industry is basically a bunch of amateurs spiced with a very thin flavoring of underfunded pros. My guess is, they know how rough it is, but they've decided not to put their meager resources into half-fixing it. Sad but true. I thought many times of building a VTT, but the reality is, while I feel totally confident in my skills and ability to put together a team, I cannot do it on the sorts of budgets that are available. It deserves 30-50 million $ worth of work, and that's probably order of magnitude more than what Roll20 or Astral, etc. have to spend. It doesn't help that HTML/CSS/JavaScript is a perfectly ghastly toolkit that doubles, triples and quadruples costs, but so it is and we're stuck with that too! lol.
Yeah, Astral's 'documentation' so to speak is no better. As I say, their explanation of how to create a character sheet is so confused and incomplete that I still cannot make heads nor tails of any of it. There's HINTS that some interesting functionality might exist SOMEWHERE in it, but how to access it and what hoops to jump through is completely not apparent. The actual UI does nothing to guide the user either, like as I said before, loads of stuff is enabled even though none of it will work until you carry out another step that isn't obviously meant to be done first. I mean, that's just sort of basic UX no no's that shouldn't happen.
Did it? It clearly broke the resource refresh model, and it undid a lot of the benefits of AEDU, which IMHO are pretty nice. I'd be far overstating the case to say it was bad or even not reasonably solid, but it was going in the wrong direction for 4e. It made the game LESS playable. I don't even think that the e-classes were all that 'easier to play' as they were supposedly intended to be. Slayer, you STILL have to pick a stance every round (or decide not to change what you have now, same thing) vs picking an At-Will in classic 4e, no difference in cognitive burden there at all, but IMHO stances are not as straightforward as "hit it with this power" is. Likewise you have to keep track of how many power attacks you have and if you want to use one now or not, which is maybe slightly simpler than picking one of a couple of encounter powers or deciding to use a daily, and then keeping track of those. Its pretty close to a toss-up. There's some simplification in character build, granted, but effectively that comes at the cost of losing a lot of options.
Yeah, I use OO Calc, or I did for a good while. Built some sheets for my own homebrew, but I've found that nowadays Google Sheets has advanced to a point where it really beats Calc or Excel hands down, and the collaborative nature of that platform has obvious applications... You can build service functions there too, and call them from sheets, docs, or even web pages. I mean, you could do that with AWS/GCP/Azure and some know-how as well, but the Google version of it does kind of lower the bar. Its a BIG improvement over what they had 5 or 6 years ago.
