If we should have learned something from IBM's Paradox of the active user besides that people don't want to read manuals, is that manuals are not there to make people use products, but rather to enable people's use of products to be, well, as productive as possible within given product designs. New users may be attracted to a product because a manual tells them how it works better for them than similar products, however.
I use NEPMD myself, and I used IBM-supplied EPM. It's not the 80s any more, so I expect any user to be able to use (e)FTE(2), (N)EPM(D), or any other text editor with pull down menus without reading a manual for that. File -> open, Edit -> Copy, etc., should be obvious to everyone by now, like using a mouse has become for the most part. Scratching the surface and trying out extra, non-obvious menu entries to see what happens is entirely up to users. But these programs go way beyond the basics common to all editors, and how to take advantage of that is often not self-evident. That's when the manual can make a difference. You may have a great one that even being incomplete gets you on track with what you can do and how (NEPMD), or a bad one that won't (EPM). Or, as was the case for FTE, you can be left out in the cold with a dry, cryptic reference to some 'internal commands' (?), and your curiosity. That is the gap I tried to plug with my first version of a manual for it, not more, not less. The question remains whether I did a reasonably good job, and whether it's worth to invest more time on future versions.
Regarding your other comments:
All the zipped FTEs you can find at Hobbes work out of the box (I tried them all) -- unzip and run, no assembly required. Therefore, I would hardly have a problem with users developing their own extra/enhanced configs and sharing them (just like M. DeBusk or myself did) for others to try. I would hardly have a problem either with developers picking that up and bundling it with a newer version, just like M. Greene did: you never had to "download and install yet another" nothing. If you downloaded any of *my* config packages to try and get them running on your system, anyway, they all came with their little readmes trying to explain the why and how of it all, and revision histories.
If you're worried there are several versions of anything, what can I say. I always tried to keep just the latest one of *my own* stuff and I will clean up again soon -- it's not my fault if archivists at Hobbes went missing for a month, then went back to work just at the right time.
As for the .WPI, it includes (a version of) my configs, but I didn't produce the archive, let alone upload it to Hobbes. If you are curious about why I published new configs in parallel to the WPI, it just so happens that the current developer forgot to tell me he was modifying my work, or was going to release it, or ask me if I had gone on with it for the last six years, which turns out I had. And alas, while my own configs still work flawlessly with the older FTEs, they need to undergo modifications to work with what is inside that WPI I knew nothing about. We are trying to work out the current situation, so I am confident there will be fewer 'packages' to confuse you in the future. Meanwhile, I decided I could still contribute in other positive ways, like trying to document a great program for the benefit of others.