Sorry for the late response, the DTK release needed some attention.
I split the origin thread and moved our conversation to a new thread in developer sub forum.
stravant wrote:Unfortunately my current changes are basically just taking a hammer to things that I don't like which aren't exposed in the settings yet to force them to act the way I want. For instance, not holding priority after casting a spell / activating an ability in some situations where the deck's I'm playing never need it (IMO auto-holding priority like that at all is a huge mistake, it slows down games so much just for the 0.1% case where you actually want to hold priority), and shifting around parts of the UI to the places that I'd prefer them.
This shouldn't be a problem to implement I guess. The user should be able to switch it on/off in preferences. Of course it can be a improvement at situations. To be honest I don't miss it much, because I use most of the time the short keys to act and that doesn't feel uncomfortable for me. But maybe the reason for that is that I don't play myself so much (sadly I need more time for coding

).
stravant wrote:I will be doing some work to try to improve the mana payment interface though. That's the biggest dealbreaker to do with the program over Cockatrice for me right now, that paying for spells is so clunky in comparison. I'm going to try to implement some shortcuts / smarter logic to make it much more fluid, in a nice general enough way that can be merged in. Most of the time the engine should be able to figure out with 100% certainty how to tap a land and pay it into a spell with a single click rather than forcing you to pick colors / modes.
That's for sure something that can and should be improved. Problem here is that at least for some situations it can be difficult to calculate if there is a possibility that it may make sense to tap in another way for non basic mana effects. But here is clearly potential to improve the flow of mana tapping.
stravant wrote:The other area I was looking at is card rendering. Is there any particular reason that cards aren't rendered MTGO style (rendered from the card characteristics + card art rather than a static image) right now? Or has there just not been developer time to do it yet?
No there is no particular reason. Of course a more card size adjustable image handling would be a very welcome improvement. The sreen sizes of users vary nowadays a lot and a one size fits all isn't working very well for the edges of the user spectrum.