I opened up the article by just hoping to find this one thing: I simply would like to whitelist already installed programs and block everything else, ideally without configuring anything.
by default %programfiles% and %programfiles(x86)% are whitelisted, so for most users pretty much that's exactly what they will do with Lockdown, launch it click Enable and that is all that needs to be done. Granted you do need to worry about specifically whitelisting programs not installed to those locations, which are few if any for most people, and actually it wouldn't be a bad feature idea to add an automatic scan for them since some apps insist on running from nested %appdata% folders...
That would really simplify things