Trello was excellent before Atlassian purchased it and added bloat. I often wished for a clone of the pre-Atlassian Trello.

>> Is it so complicated to make the Trello interface configurable? > Yes, it is complicated. Trello interface will not be configurable to the degree you are proposing in the observable future.

It's rather unfortunate that investing many man-years into bad-to-worse re/designs is less complicated than giving users freedom to make it better and avoid the pain

No way. Atlassian’s Confluence is the worst tech in history followed by Microsoft teams, followed by jira for holding the door open for confluence. At best they can try to shoot for fourth worst in tech’s history.

I saw this coming ages ago when Atlassian acquired them. Trello and Jira co-existing never made any sense. I moved everything to Notion for a while, but that had its own (extremely annoying) quirks and features. I use Google Sheets now and am happy. The UI isn't flashy, but for tracking whether something's backlogged, WIP or Done, it does the job. Plus, if/when Google decides to pull the rug and RIP Sheets, I can export into an immortal copy of Excel 2010 somewhere and use it til the end of days!