I agree with phelt and Jonas. To add another comparison:
Think of using the Windows Explorer. If you only use it to find your files and move or copy some files from time to time, it will work OK for you. But if you do that quite often, you will see that it's easier to open two Explorer windows and drag & drop files between those windows. Because it's far too much trouble to set up those two Explorer windows every time you wan't to do some file movements, you will start to use something like WinCommander because it offers you the "split mode" by default...
I convinced a lot of people to download MJ 8 and they all found out that it's the best tool to organize and tag their music library. But after they organized everything and tidied up their harddisk structure to reflect their needs, they returned to their old way of
listening to music: Using Windows Explorer as file browser and drag the files from there to the WinAmp playlist...They told me that they would continue to use MJ 8 for organization but that it would be far too much trouble to switch around between MJ's Library, MJ's Playlists and MJ's Playing Now just to set up their playlists for normal listening usage.
I told my friends to take a look at the MC 9.1 betas and they were enthusiastic about the new look, the panes and the usage of Album Thumbnails. But after they tried to use the new properties system, they told me: "OK, we will stay with MJ 8 until this has been fixed. It's far too much trouble to drag around the separators to get the window to a useful size and drag them back after tagging. And why don't they use tabs for that? And why didn't they improved the making of playlists?"
I have to say that I agree with my friends here. I love to develop new stuff for MC and I believe that these problems will be removed some day...but I use MC 9.1 only on my workstation for testing and developing. On my living room music server, there's still running MJ 8 and over there I do the organize stuff, because I don't trust in the properties system of MC 9.1 so far. The "expand and collapse control" is the wrong kind of control for that purpose and it's too small without draging around and I don't like using the windowed mode of the properties window, too. In MJ 8, the properties were windowed, but the application was "locked" untill the properties window was closed. With MC 9.1, it's like in the above mentioned Explorer comparison...you have to drag around to set up a view where the properties window is next to MC to make it useful - otherwise it can be hidden behind MC and the trouble starts... Altogether, the current properties system of MC 9.1 leaves the users with feelings of unsafeness and awkwardness. I think that an implementation of a clean split screen view is the only thing to solve this problem - and many other things like making playlists, burnlists and so on. I believe that most people prefer "What You See Is What You Get" when they do stuff on their computers...
I agree with phelt that "Distinct labeling of the views might be a step in the right direction" to avoid confusion...Maybe you would like to take a look at the
GUI improvements for MC 9.1
thread again. This thread is from the "pre-pane-era", but it shows some examples how a "split screen view" could be realized. You can even see examples for "distinct labeling" there. I thought about making some new examples that take the new panes into consideration several times...unfortunately, I don't have the time to make them at the moment. But I will try to post them in a few days.
Sorry for the long post and my bad english and if something sounds too harsh - I'm just trying to explain things and I'm dreaming of pushing the usability of MC to a higher level