Hmmm,

Firstly, it is not in the interests of the vendors of this type of application to make it simple or easy to use. They make money out of training, and want the ability to use their software effectively to be a skillset in its own right.

I see not much has changed since my days in the armaments industry.

The first thing you might like to look at is creating your own user defined model templates. This works if a lot of what you do falls into groups of similar items. If possible create the template data in a different font or colour so that you can easily see what you have overwritten or not Because there are already data there it should prompt you to remember the parameters and values?

You could also look at a database of commands and input forms in something like Access? This might slightly speed things up, but it would take a fair bit of setting up I would imagine. I haven't looked at very recent versions of office but Access certainly used to let you define your own prompt screens and to verify input against permitted parameters.

I really don't see any future in looking at the underlying code. What they appear to have done is created their own "higher level language" that sits on top of it.