Sorry if this has been discussed before, I did look briefly and didn't see anything.

I'm just wondering why the SE is so horribly useless? So much so that it is practically unusable. The one on Tygem , for example, is very accurate, and it can't be that hard to get one that is at least 10 times better than the current one.

It has its faults, and I don't think anyone would argue that it is superb, but I wouldn't characterize it as "horribly useless." That said, the issue has been discussed before. I recall a particular discussion (or two) discussing how it came about. If I recall correctly, the code for it was not written by wms and is crazy complicated. I vaguely recall someone who offered to improve it running away in terror after taking a look (but don't quote me--I didn't bother searching for the thread). And my understanding is that scoring estimators are actually pretty tricky.

I am sure that writing a new Score Estimator from scratch would be a better option than trying to improve the existing one. Installing one from elsewhere might well be better than either.

Thanks judicata, I will try a bit harder to dig up the old threads.