I'm one of the people with the doujin filter set to hide them. Personally, I do not want to see any of them. There are multiple reasons but the main three are
- Fan arrangements don't interest me (I don't want to have to look through the 95% bad to find the 5% good)
- Availability: I just don't have the initiative to go and find all these Japanese-only, con-only, limited-only things.
- Sheer volume: There really are just far too many. And they come in giant waves (tsunamis???) that coincide with the komiket events.
To be honest, the filter isn't even consistent across pages. I forget which ones it's supposed to work on and which ones it doesn't but I know it's not filtered everywhere.
... rant
I don't have the answers to the simplification question. I've been stressing simplification and "general use" for years to no avail. There's too many phantom standards, inconsistent standards and just plain sloppy application of existing standards to add any more. I have no problem with detailed data, that's obviously one of the goals of the database, but people tend to forget that kind of data is really only for the very, very minority of us on this site that actually care about it. The end users largely don't. They come here for tracklists, translations, artist and product databases, cover art, collection functionality and the marketplace. They don't come here to discuss the differences between doujin, fan original, fan arrange or compliation albums. And they don't care what the final outcome of said discussion is, either.
What would be nice, would be a top level set of data for the general case and a drillable, searchable, sortable level for the specific case. Go to an album page, see that it's "doujin" by specification (or color highlight). Want to know what detail that really means? Click a "+" and expand it to see it has fan arrangements and original work. Want to find all works by ZUN? Search for it. Want to find all works by ZUN that are doujin with [...]? Advanced search it.
Of course, that requires modification to the database, the sql and the HTML. Which I realize just isn't going to happen. The amount of proposed changes by and large far outweighs the amount of actual changes that happen.
... /rant
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