Xrylene

Agreed on both counts, this change would be more intuitive than the current clunky way of maintaining combo points, and I believe when such clunkiness exists there are two solutions, to either remove the interaction entirely, or to streamline it into a better flowing solution. As for Naramon, I chose it as my playstyle has always heavily emphasized melee, but it's quite hard to justify it for general play. It has niches, mostly in affinity farming or maintaining combo with certain setups, but most of the tree doesn't really work out. I'm not entirely convinced the tree needs to focus on melee to begin with, it could have benefits that do work with melee without needing to specifically emphasize it, but given what we have I'd think the tree would be most suited to one of three possible focuses. The first is emphasizing some sort of stack/buff oriented playstyle similar to what combo points already do, but in a broader sense(so not only with melee, it might be somewhat like how some arcanes or the galvanized mods focus on maintaining stacks). The second is leaning into the affinity farming and more broadly making the tree good for farming or leveling, something you might want to use when getting affinity or trying to get resources. The third possible angle would be looking into the mobility stuff it has and making that more of a focus, a tree you would use specifically for getting around fast in missions, but I find this questionable as void slinging is already quite fast anyway. Regardless, combo efficiency as a stat would be an improvement over heavy attack efficiency and would fit into more builds as a nice stat to have, and would make existing heavy attack setups feel smoother to play, so I'm all for it.

Forma to specific configurations would indeed be extremely useful and would fix the main issue of needing to go all in on them. Another solution which could be used as an alternative, or alongside such a change, would be to expand the pool of umbra mods such that they are less niche. The current ones only cover some very basic mod types, however there are other basic mod types that could have umbra versions, meaning instead of needing the specific 3 for warframes and 2 for melee that we have, you might mix and match. Consider for example Redirection, Stretch, Streamline and Continuity for warframes, covering shields and the other ability focused mods, then for melee maybe Prowess, Fury, and Killing Blow/Reflex Coil could be options to lean into status, speed and heavy attacks, though admittedly Prowess as is might be a bit too weak to really consider. Point being, the problem currently is both that your slots are locked to this investment in a more constraining way than normal forma(significantly so considering you could make a forma per day), and that the actual benefits are somewhat niche due to being locked to only one specific configuration that can be used to begin with. If some umbra mods were interchangeable for other basic enabling mod types, then there may be more incentive to use umbral forma on warframes and weapons that might not otherwise make use of them currently.

I am unsure of what the specific problem is, but multiple attempts at completing Mad Lab do not give credit, and this is not the first time I have encountered this, I last dealt with this about a year ago where I needed to attempt it over a dozen times, doing the same steps, before it finally worked. To clarify, I did it once back then, and at some point went on a hiatus, so this is my first time seeing this objective again since getting back into the game. I start the Capture mission on Jupiter(Ananke), specifically looking for a starting tile that has a lab entrance, you start outside with a ramp leading upwards to the station, inside is a hall that has pillars and two paths branching off to the left and right, this is what the tile looks like: https://imgur.com/322TY7r . I hit the breakable console on one of the pillars, then do the timed shape puzzle switches to get inside the first gate, where I open the first purple locker, all other lockers, break any creates, and interact with the corpse, here you can see the opened locker in the first chamber: https://imgur.com/Yegz8m7 . I then use the spoiler mode to open the second door, where the scientists, amalgams, and sentient are, and kill all of them, both the glass capsule ones in the middle and the horizontal cryopod-style ones on the sides, and grab the purple locker in an alcove here while smashing any crates that spawn, here is another screenshot to illustrate, note the open purple locker: https://imgur.com/bRHziqK . To my knowledge, this is what is required, beyond that I just need to finish the mission and extract, which I have been doing, here is a screenshot showing a scene from each locker, but still no credit: https://imgur.com/xvbX9F2 . I have confirmed these requirements by checking videos as well, so if there is something that I am doing wrong, be very specific so I can confirm it. I have tried to search for information on what is going wrong here repeatedly to no results, the majority of results are people not understanding how to open the second door, or that they need to fully loot everything past the first door as well as in the lab. If there is something else that I could be missing, it does not show up in any searches. I have also tried other mission types, using the same lab tile, such as assassination, and I have confirmed that I shouldn't have a separate Nightwave mission objective conflicting(as one result mentioned needing to complete their 3 captures before it counted). This is not fun to repeat over and over again with zero indication of whether it is tripping whatever flags are necessary, it is not a good Nightwave objective to begin with due to being weirdly obscure and not having rewards worth grabbing again(outside of possibly the special mods which are weirdly rare), the fact that it doesn't give credit until extraction makes it even less clear what is going wrong as well. That I had this issue about a year ago, and am experiencing it yet again suggests that whatever is wrong with this hasn't been identified or fixed, which is odd considering as a Nightwave objective it should come up for other players, but seeing as it seems to sometimes work and sometimes not, I suspect there's some conflict that leads to it being inconsistent.