Many of these comments are legit, but as someone who works with faculty in a system that uses Blackboard, I must say that many instructors who use the software are indifferent, disorganized, and inconsistent. I find it hard to believe that a different software would magically solve these problems.
Blackboard can be frustrating and there's a learning curve, but this is true of virtually any software. (Ever used Photoshop, for example?) If content is "so hard to find in Blackboard that it causes students anxiety" the faculty member should seek some help. In that case, the problem isn't Blackboard--it's the user.
As someone who has had to work with BlackBoard as staff and then as student, and then as student rep on the curriculum committee, and then designing a new way to manage content at my school, I strongly disagree that there should be any learning curve. Our system is set up so you see the edit button as soon as you roll over the event, and then you login, and the login takes you to the event edit. Full disclosure, we're solving the problem for a med school, not a full on university, but there are a lot of med/law/business/etc schools at universities that would be much better served by a more focused system.
The user isn't the problem. The mind boggles that you even said that.
Why does something this "simple" (compared to photoshop, at least) have a learning curve?
The problem, especially when it comes to web-based apps, is never the user when it's a question of findability or usability. The onus is on the software interface designer and information architect to make things usable and findable. Especially for something so easily organized as "Courses, users who can access the course, assignments and turned in assignments, tests/quizes and grades, communication between students and students, and students and teacher."
Blackboard is an incredibly inefficient and confusing user interface for what it is.
The concept of blaming the user for usability problems is disheartening...
In this case it's blaming the professor for problems encountered by students, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. There are professors who were dragged kicking and screaming into the e-mail age five years ago and immediately forced to basically manage a web site. They go through what is to them a series of meaningless magic rituals, the chapter 10 section 3 homework assignment gets uploaded to the chapter6/Mondays/quizzes/attic/old/personal_photos/onion_on_my_belt/tarnation directory, one foreign student with an exaggerated impression of the consequences for missing a homework assignment actually clicks through every folder on the site until she finds it, and the professor gives a 0 on that assignment to every other student in the class because they didn't turn it in. And that, my friends, is a true story (merely the worst of many) though directory names have been changed because I can't really remember.
That said, Blackboard was really awful when I used it, which was six or seven years ago. It was archaic and felt like a careless amateur effort. Even on the best-organized Blackboard class site, everything was a few clicks further away than it should have been. It doesn't sound like they've had much incentive to improve it since then.
Blackboard can be frustrating and there's a learning curve, but this is true of virtually any software. (Ever used Photoshop, for example?) If content is "so hard to find in Blackboard that it causes students anxiety" the faculty member should seek some help. In that case, the problem isn't Blackboard--it's the user.