Thank you mesnitu,
There are those that have paid to obtain desired functionality and allowed that operation to be incorporated for all to use and there have been conversations that have been had that identified ways that this could be made ever more versatile. Yes, there is or can be a lot that goes into making such a useful tool. As is the case with almost everything ZC, a business need generally births a business solution. Chadder saw this in his line of work and developed EP4 building off of those that collaborated before him and with him.##
I came across this software when trying to find a way to populate the store of a non-profit organization with a list of items provided to me using a spreadsheet. Later, after working with potteryhouse/jeking on Stock By Attributes, having a discussion with someone about the real world difficulty with performing an inventory of attributable stock, and trying to address the lack of attributable stock seen with ZC upon my first install of ZC back in 2011, I incorporated an SBA interface. In parallel and with a great deal of consternation I developed an intermediate plugin that would use the free existing CEON URI rewriter to auto-generate URIs through the use of EP4. I plan to continue to support these two additional features in my own way and to build them off of the new plugin (now available btw).##
Long and short of it, it's unfortunate that outside of this community (and inside of it by some) that ZC is no longer in the top pick of advertised eCommerce sites. The important thing for anyone reading is to take the time to post about an issue, to request a change (preferred over demanding one as so many seem to be doing these days), explain the why, etc... Mesnitu you did this in discussion of bookx and while you did the grunt work, a way to merge the functionality of it with EP4 was found and made. The same is true for the new software that it will be able to incorporate the features of the bookx plugin as well as the operations recently inquired about. ##
There are many that have left ZC to come back because of the difficulty experienced, lack of functionality, etc... with other product. The core developers have made a number of changes for the current (and future) version to try to give ZC a face-lift (a significant reason that "reviewers" suggest other such applications) and continue to incorporate new features, but it is through community input either by those that need something or those that have a vision that improvements can be made. The code issue identified above has existed since January 3rd, 2015 with the issue of version 4.0.28 when the zen_record_admin_activity function was first incorporated into EP4 to expand functionality to operate under ZC 1.5.4+. I would like to think that if someone had identified this earlier that it would have been commented on, discussed, or corrected for others to benefit and perhaps I did receive a side comment about it which got locally corrected and thought to have been applied for all. I'll provide my thoughts on correcting the condition in a separate post.
