If the schedule editor actually worked, I'd be perfectly happy making races and then adding them through the schedule editor. But for some reason, even if a race file says Month=January, the schedule editor won't let you add the race. It even happened when I tried to add some of the default US races to an AUS schedule.
I think the change of format didn't just make it more difficult to type out, but as a new player/modder, it seemed that a lot of people who had mods were a bit exhausted at the idea of having to rewrite their whole schedule or the fact that new AI means races run differently, so you have to change stuff like field size and conditions.
I made a program where you can make a race and a schedule entry at the same time from the basic race information, which I should really make a new post about instead of mentioning offhand. I really wanted to make it so each entry got written to an Excel database, so you could also go back and search a race, then change it. Then when your whole schedule was to your liking, you'd hit "commit" and it would print the whole schedule and feature races to the right files, in the perfect format, so you wouldn't have to type out all the bracketed stuff. And if I went that complicated, I'd have error checking for those things I posted as well.
Only downside is my script is something where you enter lines of text into the command line and it tells you "success" on each print. I think the best thing would be an actual program that you could use a mouse with but I only just learnt Python to make this script over the weekend, so I'm not quite sure of where to start on that
As for jockeys and such, my game didn't work when I tried to mod the jockey names, so I'm not sure what that's like to do.