I don't get the appeal of the UI, why is it so complex/convoluted.

Lovely name! I implemented profanity monitoring in my Hermes setup to identify "learning opportunities" for my agents. It is quite useful. If you are budget-conscious, one challenge is determining what is the smallest number of previous rounds that Hermes needs to correctly infer what it did wrong. Curiously, Claude Code is horrible at figuring out what it did wrong. I often read its memories, and they are rarely useful.