The Comedy Channel consistently lists Important Things coming on when Sarah Silverman is on. I don't really have a problem with it recording an extra program I may or may not watch, but the TiVo thinks it has recorded Important Things when it hasn't, and will therefore not try to record it again.

I'd like to tell the TiVo that the schedule is wrong, but there's not really any way to do that. I can set up an intentionally conflicting show, but that's hardly "easy to use". I can tell it to record Important Things every damn time it comes on, but that might create a problem with other shows. What I want to be able to do is tell it "this wasn't the right thing; try again", but there's no way to do that.

For another example, my wife and I watch a lot of the same shows, but we aren't always able to watch them together. So we have to externally keep track of which shows each of us has watched so that they can be deleted appropriately. The TiVo should have a flag system that indicates if it's been watched or not. I'm pretty sure that it actually keeps track of that data, as if a program is deleted before anyone watches it, it will record it if it comes on again, whereas if you did watch it, it gets marked as "recorded recently" and won't be rerecorded.

Of course, we could just let them fall off if there was a way to set retention priorities, but the only really usable user option is "keep forever". What I mean is that I have recordings set up to get things like MASH and Malcolm in the Middle and a variety of reruns and other programs that I don't watch regularly, but might like to have on hand if I'm bored. But I might have something that I'm more interested in that I don't have time to watch now, but would like to hang onto as long as there's hard drive space for it. But I don't want to prioritize it above other programs that I am interested in, nor do I want to prioritize it below the random stuff I record for boredom's sake. I could manually go and set expiration dates on every recording, but, again, that's hardly "easy to use".

My point is that while the TiVo does the right thing 95% of the time, and is waaaay better than the existing alternatives, it has significant room for improvement, both in ease of use and in power.