As someone who has had to work with BlackBoard as staff and then as student, and then as student rep on the curriculum committee, and then designing a new way to manage content at my school, I strongly disagree that there should be any learning curve. Our system is set up so you see the edit button as soon as you roll over the event, and then you login, and the login takes you to the event edit. Full disclosure, we're solving the problem for a med school, not a full on university, but there are a lot of med/law/business/etc schools at universities that would be much better served by a more focused system.

The user isn't the problem. The mind boggles that you even said that.