I just tried to run the installer. At first I had trouble getting past choose a directory dialog after clicking browse. The UI would just freeze. On third try I just waited it out and eventually it became responsive. This is not good because on the first two tries I spent ages trying to kill the process, which simply refused to do so.
The installer also doesn't seem to support installing of retail FS2. I believe this is important step because all official sources for retail install do not support anything but Windows. And eventually even those sources, at least retail FS2 discs will become incompatible with newer Windows releases. It would be nice if I could point the installer to either retail FS2 discs or GOG.com FS2 installer and have the new FSO installer extract the source to install retail FS2 regardless of the OS used.
Apparently the installer also does not handle external dependencies like OpenAL. Hopefully SCP could move to statically linked OpenAL Soft (at least for Win builds) or let SDL handle audio as well. But meanwhile the installer should address this. Preferably by extracting OpenAL32.dll into the FS2 dir. Which however, is not going to work with wxLauncher... *sigh*.
I find it quite weird that cross-platform installer doesn't install the wxLauncher, the only cross-platform launcher we have. While I have my issues with it not being stand-alone executable like the old launcher is, wxLauncher is still the definite choice here as default launcher.
These two are in my opinion major cross-platform blockers and should be addressed.
As for UI asthetics, it's definitely very basic and that is actually good thing. Except for two things, the FSO logo at top does not properly resize along with resized window and the red/green lights are simply ugly. The logo can be fixed by boxing it inside a black background and centering it. The lights simply need to be replaced by something that doesn't look like 8-bit bitmaps.
I also find it slightly distracting that the UI expands all files under each mod and what have you, in both mod selection and downloading. This takes too much vertical space. Make expanding them optional and have total progress followed in the header.
Now, the next challenge is to update the mods since everything except FSO is out of date. But unfortunately once Blue Planet and possibly some other mods gets around to update theirs, the official FSO build won't run said mods. Is there any possibility of adding support for FSO executable dependencies? And let me be clear here, I think it is stupid for official mod releases to require unofficial FSO builds. BP should never have gone this route.
Another dependency issue is the mediavps, since mods may rely on several different mediavps versions.