No it's not the only thing. And no, please to not interpret my posting as "complaint".
I only meant "complaint" in terms of why chdkplus is not an adequate solution.
I think it would be really easy to use then -- when people use the overrides anyway, leaving some settings not-overriden they can get calculated to give correct exposure (taking into account the Ev-shift).
How often would this actually be able to give you correct exposure?
On cameras without an adjustable aperture, there is only a limited limited number of scenarios:
1) Set ISO, leave shutter unset
You can already do this in the Canon firmware, just set the ISO and use P mode.
2) Set shutter, leave ISO unset
You can't get this from the Canon firmware, since Auto ISO will adjust both shutter and ISO. However, given the limited range of ISO available and poor quality at the high end, you probably want something more like "custom auto ISO" in practice. Too bad custom auto iso is so confusing...
3) Set both to a fixed value. You can already do this, although the override UI is quite inconvenient for general shooting.
There is the ND filter on top of these, but it's quite limited. In most cases, you only want it in if you are already at minimum ISO, and the shutter speed required to get acceptable exposure is too high. It would be nice to allow the shutter speed to go a bit over the canon factory range before putting the ND in. You might also want to force a longer exposure in some cases, but with ~3 stops this is fairly marginal.
On cameras that do have an adjustable aperture, you already have Tv, Av and M, and Auto ISO in the Canon firmware. So unless the CHDK logic is more sophisticated than these (for example, by letting you set multiple priority levels and limits for the different values), having CHDK versions as the default alt screen would just be confusing.
So it seems to me the main issue isn't the unset values, it's having a better UI to interact with them while shooting, and possible having better control of the priorities. I agree this would be nice to have in CHDK, but I think it would be a quite a large project to get it right.