Feedback on Using Directives

I've been in a few conversations with customers lately who have asked whether we plan to do anything with directives to make them easier to use. The answer is that we're thinking about it. I've got some ideas on how we might improve in this area, but I'd really like to hear from more customers, so I thought I'd put it to the community.

A few questions to kick off the topic...

• How heavily do you use directives?
• How much time and effort do you spend managing your directives?
• Is this an area in which we should be looking to improve usability or would we be better served looking elsewhere for usability improvements?
• How would directives work in a perfect world?
• Would you use a directive checker? (A tool that would take a directive and spit out the files that would be affected.)

Any insight/feedback from the trenches would be greatly appreciated.