I am not sure it makes sense to have a save-and-close button here, since the list and the edit/add form is visible on the same page. We should rather separate those two views. Then it would make sense.

It makes sense if all screens containing the possibility to enter any kind of text has these three buttons. Anyway, the screen is horrible and should be replaced be anything like e.g. this one:
http://www.trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

Inline editing is what I miss in this and several other tables.

jqgrid is hell to maintain so we actually want to move away from it. But yes, this view needs to be refactored, and at least separate list-view from edit- or add-view.

If you want possibility to edit assessments in an excel-like manner, you can file a request for my mass edit plugin: https://github.com/olleharstedt/MassAction

I'll check out your plugin. Have you developers decided which alternative to replace jqgrid? I hope there will be done some work on re factoring all tables in the near future. Table views are what I feel has potential to be much more user friendly and better-looking throughout LS.

The plugin is in a broken state right now, I'm afraid, but you can still file an issue so I can add assessments.

First choice to replace jqgrid is probably Yii grid view, as seen in the survey list. We want to get away from inline edit and instead use pop-up modals or redirections. More info here: https://manual.limesurvey.org/Replace_jqGrid

Won't fix until we refactor the view.

Version 2.50+ Build 160516 released