Trying swiper/counsel/ivy has been a bewildering experience for me. Before I end my experiment, I thought I'd let you know, so you might have an insight into the experience of a new user.

Like most users these days, I have no time to read source code, and can only very selectively skim manuals. I likely have more tha 500 packages and applications of different kinds, considering all the Emacs packages that are loaded, modules for the various programming languages I use, LaTeX packages, etc. If there is something I was supposed to read on page 43 of some document, my apologies; it would be more than a full time job to give that much attention to something like an Emacs package.

First, I find it a bit confusing that there are three different names used by the package. I think I see your rationale, but again, I don't have the bandwidth for following package authors down fanciful rabbit holes. I prefer that people respect the realistic mental bandwidth and time limitations of their users and make everything as simple as possible.

Next, I'm confronted with what appear to me to be very strange choices of faces. For one example, calling counsel-switch-buffer pops up a list of buffers in a variety of different faces which is quite busy, confusing, and, frankly rather grotesque from a typographic perspective.

What's worse, I have no idea what most the faces signify. A quick glance at your manual was not enlightening.

What's even worse, I can't tell which buffer name is selected because typically a lot of the displayed buffer names are in the same face as the current selection. In the customization buffer for Ivy faces, I see that the face is probably ivy-current-match. (I'm not filtering or attempting to match anything, so I don't know why that face is used at all.) It's not clear to me from the face names which of the Ivy faces is intended to show the current selection; whatever it is, I'm not seeing it in my setup.

Unfortunately, these and other problems make Ivy unusable for me, so I won't be attempting to track down the issues, but I thought it would be a courtesy to you to let you know my experience.