Sorry guys, I humbly beg to differ. I believe the eswap is a fine evolution of the portal and has been introduced for our benefit.
Of course it has bugs which need to be worked out as with any new application(even Apple has this problem). I agree that the pilots workload is high and as a consequencee swaps are not easy to engineer. That is a fact of life but if you want to go to Munich iso Paris or SFO iso LAX, then there should be few limits. The system was never intended to change the profile of hours that the crew fly in a month. This means that it won't work for the guys that would like to commute.
In terms of the swap rules, the bulk of them are available in the Bid Assist packages which details time off before & time off after a trip. You guys know the FTL rules.....why should the company have to spell it out for you. Another big one is the 120 hours between east/west rotations which was introduced for the benefit of the pilots who were complaining about flights that would go east and then next flight would go west causing fatigue. This restriction was introduced to 'artificially' bias rosters to all eastbound or all westbound flights. Unfortunately this now causes problems when you want to swap as well, but we cannot have it both ways.
The fact that swaps are locked from the time bidding is closed(13th?) is a reasonable and practical limitation. By then you would have had almost 3 weeks in which to do your swapping. You cannot plan a pilot's flying for the next month when you do not know how many hours he is doing in the current month, hence the limit. Pain in the backside, sure but certainly not unreasonable.....
In short, I agree that the system is limited but at least IMHO the company is trying to provide tools to make life a little easier for us.