Matt,
Seeing as the tree is going to go
What do you mean by that? Are you going to eliminate the Media Library Tree altogether?
Still don't feel comfortable with this new GUI. Too many things look uncertain and many things seem to need a big deal of rework. I also notice many inconsistencies, just one sample:
If you click on a music file you get the cover art on the bottom-left pane. If you click on an image you just get a filename instead of a thumbnail. This is really inconsistent.
I would prefer a slow, steady improvement of the GUI interface instead of such radical changes.
Also in my opinion it is more important to have a clean and consistent implementation of media type dependencies than this new GUI. Reserve it for MC10.
Whenever you make changes, you have to remember that it is not a music jukebox program any longer, it is now a media center and things should work properly for music, images, video, tv and radio and integration with all the different hardware.
According to my understanding a minor upgrade such as 9.1 should improve and perfect of what was done in the main release and not introduce big, new features or changes.
Users will buy MC9.0, love it, then upgrading thinking of kind of a bug-fix release and being confronted with a total new interface! Don't rely too much on the opinions of the forum here, these are all afictionados, think of a standard user that buys the product.
The learning curve for MC9 is quite steep and it takes time to learn all the goodies. Radical changes make the user insecure and he may think this is a product still in its experimental phase. Products need some kind of stability and reliability over long periods of time to be really accepted by the masses.
Also, this radical change was not something users in this forum asked for, they asked for improving a few things and concerning the GUI, it has been a long-standing wish of having Playing Now and Media library on concurrent screens.
Although the new GUI might be liked by many here, I do not think it is a brilliant idea to be introduced now!
Slow and small improvements are the path to perfection, perfectly working functionality, not radical changes and GUI polishing!
Sorry, but someone has to shout the opposite way!