Maybe I've just internalized how to use Anki in a way that works well and avoid it's pitfalls, but what are the actual problems you have with it?
I suppose making it manual might not be ideal, but errors are very few and far between.
>general ui is dated
I don't really know what this means. Why change something that works just because it's stayed the same for a while?
Maybe I'm just tired of apps that get more and more bloated and slower year after year, while the ui gets changed to "simplify" things and become less usable as a result.
But anki has mostly stayed the same, it's fast, responsive, does what I need it to do, almost never crashes, etc. It's also been a daily routine to use for literally years, so it's sort of soothing. Yeah it has some rough edges, but they don't come up very often.