> E.g., I have one device 'foo' which you already trust. I add a new device 'bar'. Why on earth would you want to verify its key manually when I could just send you the new key from 'foo' which you already trust?
This particular issue is being worked on right now in Riot, and should be fixed early in the new year.
The UI could definitely be improved, but the core team has recently hired a UI designer, so hopefully this will improve in the future. If you have any other feedback that you've heard from your trainings, I'm sure the core team would love to hear about it either in their issue tracker (e.g. github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues for Riot web), or in the Matrix rooms (#riot:matrix.org or #matrix:matrix.org).
> You might get a python-cffi package conflict error at this point which will cause the matrix-synapse install to fail. If this is the case, we'll install Aptitude (an alternative Debian package manager) to help us resolve the conflict semi-painlessly.
An easier way to resolve the conflict is to just run "apt install python-cffi/jessie-backports".
This particular issue is being worked on right now in Riot, and should be fixed early in the new year.