How you came to the conclusion that browsing games is difficult is also beyond me. I don't consider two clicks to get here to be "jumping through hoops". Considering the website back in '03 had the same amount of clicks to get to Unpublished Games (Games Live -> Unpublished Games).
I think it's pretty good (better than anything we've had before), but I am coming from a biased view of knowing how it all works. As are you and others in this thread. The best way to know is to query new people and see how they find the site. I've tested it with many people and they haven't had problems (although they haven't necessarily stuck around due to content or interest). If you or others can do the same, we could use the feedback.
Like I've said a bunch of times before, a lot goes into this little project because we have to manage the software, the website, and the community. We try very hard to take user feedback into account, but that is challenging when some users want things a certain way and others want it the opposite. Most common are blanket statements like "X sucks" which are absolutely worthless to us outside of lowering our opinion of the commenter.
Not necessarily. I don't go browsing for games and very rarely use that all purpose list of games. I generally stick to BYOND RPG submits and random pager invitations. I'll grant that I knew the page existed, but not from where the link to it was located. Logic told me that it'd have to be somewhere on a games page. =)
Another thing to take into account is the user I'm initially replying to has been around almost as long as I have, and probably knows how to browse the site as well as I do. My point is merely that the difference in layouts from 2003 to 2009 isn't really that big. The only difference outside the clicks themselves is the location of the second link. Where Unpublished Games was a big category box in 2003, it's now a small link down the bottom of the byond.com/games/ pages. Still not "jumping through hoops" in my books.
I don't have any friends to invite to BYOND really. Most of my friends are less computer orientated than myself. They'd rather deal with physical cards, dice and console control pads. However, I get asked a lot of questions from the general community via pager and MSN, very rarely does someone ask me where to find something on the site. Short of the site's search engine thing, I've not really had to explain anything outside of setting up guilds and setting permissions and whatnot like that (which reminds me, I should probably that stuff into an article).
That gives you two options and a qualifier. Majority Rules, what the developers think is best for their future plans and to make the decider: Which one is easier to maintain.