Couldn’t agree more! It’s an important area of functionality for many communities but this implementation is, sadly, IMO kind of a mess. I hate to say that, Discourse has really been taking some great strides in usability, design, etc. lately. But this is clearly far behind and seems to need a lot of work, if not a complete overhaul.
So… I decided to try to make my own more event-focused plugin. Here’s a video demonstrating some of its features after 3 days of vibe coding.
All of this stuff works, though I’m sure there are a lot of bugs still (and definitely a ton of layout, styling, and visual polish to do). My hope is to iterate on it for a week or so, with a good portion of that being bug fix and polish (feature freeze planned for tomorrow), after which I hope to deploy it on my own instance for live use. If things work out maybe I’ll be able to share it later, with the giant caveats around it being entirely vibes. 
Here’s a short list of most of what it does:
- Completely stand-alone events entities, with/without topics or chats (both work)
- Venue and room handling (rooms within venues)
- Room reservation with locations (multiple rooms per location), reservation contention handling, dedicated pages for locations and rooms, hours of operation for rooms, capacity, etc.
- Month, week, day, venue (events per venue), and list views with rich filters across all views
- Rich Event description editor and settings, repeat, All Day events, time zone support, event capacity, room capacity
- Location pages with maps, rooms-at-location list, events-at-location list
- Quick access to full event info from calendar and other views (pop-up details)
- Drag on day/week view to create events + times (auto-filled in new event form)
- Auto-filled event creation info depending on where/how the event is created, e.g. from a Room, that room is auto-filled
- Calendar (ICS) subscriptions at multiple levels (per-calendar, per-location, etc.)
- Permissions system for a variety of controls (who can create rooms/locations vs. events, etc.)
- Drafts and publish/unpublish state for events, locations, rooms (and canceled state for events)
- RSVP, event capacity, etc.
- Events list widget for sidebar, event list in Categories
- Most of this also works in mobile, though that’s still heavily WIP in particular
- Probably other stuff I’m forgetting
Is it too much? Maybe! But I want to see what I’ll find useful before I prune.
I also hope to have a comprehensive range of settings in the back-end. If I can emulate some of what the existing official Events/Calendar plugin does with e.g. sorting topics by event date, I’ll try to do so.