Well, I was using MC9 only for music for the longest time, and I would have wanted to delete all the other stuff.
Then one day I accidentally pointed MC9 at my photos directory and imported a bunch of them. I have all my photos organized in directories, so I thought, what the heck, backed up my library and updated properties from the file path. Which worked beautifully. The image tagging features work really well - not quite like Adobe's album, but better than a lot of image managers. It turned out to be *really* quick and easy to assign moods & genres to large batches of pictures, and therefore create slides shows which match with music.
So I decided to try it for videos and it worked really well too.
The web radio, even in it's current primitive state, is OK.
I still haven't found a use for TV, and since I don't have any TV hardware maybe that option should just go away.
However, a lot of stuff that I initially thought was superfluous has turned out to be really quite handy. Give it a try. Some of those auto-smartlists turn out to be really useful, and they're a good library of examples. Throw them in a smartlist group and ignore them, but you may one day find it useful to refer back to them.
However, the general idea of controlling which items in the tree are visible is a good one - maybe linked to the party mode to create a super-simple interface.