About obscuring the action, i wonder if it wouldn't be better if all other unit movements pause until the popup has been dealt with. But, i understand that would come with its own problems.

About forgetting that a caravan is ready, i don't think that's such a big problem. The caravan gets its focus back next turn and essentially just loses a turn. The worst case scenario is if the player forgets sending the caravan there and sends it out again.

Following on from discussion in patch #2206:

In general, it does feel like we need a new workflow for caravan orders (and maybe other things like diplomat actions).

Having the popup occur in the flurry of turn-change activities was bad for various reason (e.g. taking focus, obscuring the action), which is why we have "Pop up caravan actions" as an option (r15533), but if you turn that off it's easy to forget that a caravan is ready.

Commercial CivIV has a fairly forced workflow, where it takes you through decisions like city production, promotions, and units in some fixed order. This helps not forget things, but it's still not ideal; if you don't want to deal with a thing at the point it prompts because you need other information (you're locked out of seeing all information due to the forced workflow), you have to cancel and remember to go back and review the thing later.

I wonder if there's scope for putting pending-caravan-decisions on the unit focus queue, and popping up the caravan dialog whenever focus gets to a unit, and allowing the usual unit focus keys like "W" to dismiss the popup non-permanently (so it will appear again next time the unit comes up)? In this world, a unit capable of an action would stay on the queue even if it had no movement points left.

That still doesn't quite fix the case where your first unit after turn change needs a popup, but you don't want the popup obscuring your view of the post-turn action -- although it'll help a bit as the popup will naturally pop up a bit later. Perhaps you want the option of some unobtrusive proxy for the popup, like a particular modification to the unit icon.

(Obviously having the specify-action-in-advance envisaged by bug #16905 would also help some players, but it would still be good to have a better workflow for those not making plans in advance.)