I think the main problem is that there is a lack of maintainers and the ones that exist seem to be mainly inactive.
Yeah, and it's quite a tedious task to submit test-results, new versions and new apps into appdb. Maybe we need a few more active ones.
If they were active then there would already be notes pointing to easy fixes for the apps like NoCD patches, d3dx9xx.dll files, etc. I agree a pre-parser for common issues would be nice, but probably quite a bit of coding work and likely to get many wrong hits.
I'll try to give it a shot later, something like a page with "commaon failures". Could take a while though...
It isn't all that complex. It would require someone to start to collect common debug output from users and then look at how we might look for particular dlls or errors to identify the particular issue. For someone with lots of experience it wouldn't seem to be all that difficult but it really depends on how generic some errors are.
I never played with appdb code so i'm afraid i'm of no help there :(
Chris