all software and data should be freely available - which precludes Windows.
and making it understandable only to a tiny minority.
And I say this as a software/hardware developer, having programmed in assembler and C on 8048, 8051, z8, z80, z180, z280, 80x86, Atmel 90S, h8/300, h8/500, various FPGAs, ASIC design, CP/M2.2, DOS, windoze, Fortran, Pascal, Basic, gawd knows what else... I think my anorak qualifications are impeccable, despite no longer being a paid up member of the British Subterranean Society
The price for using free data is that it could never be certified
and it will also be full of errors, once away from the well trodden GA routes. Fortunately data doesn't have to be certified if used in a portable device.
But this is why people pay money for flight planning software. Somebody is sitting there, getting paid for populating the database.
Anybody can write a flight planning program which totally blows everything currently out out of the water (well, certainly this was true when Navbox or Flitestar were the only games in town). It should take a few months, max.
Getting the data is the huge challenge. It is easy to rip it off from certain well known commercial products but then you cannot openly supply/sell the result. Even at the IFR level, where things should be easy, you can get the airway database but you cannot get the SIDs/STARs...