Hi Jim, All,
I completely respect that this is your product and you can do with it as you wish, and you all do a great job! As a passionate user and public advocate of your software (as a DJ lot's of people all over the state have asked me what I use), I have a self interest in sharing my insights and wishes with you, in hopes of making the product as user friendly as possible, that's all. You guys are stellar at responding to people in this forum and the community spirit that you have engendered is fantastic.
My day job is as a user experience designer and usability specialist. I've been doing it for over 15 years at places like IBM, Apple, Sun... so when I hear faulty reasoning or half explanations, I know it. I don't let my engineering teams get away with that and so I ask follow-up questions or clarify my concerns with them... which is what I was doing here. I understand that because of architecture or other constraints sometimes the answer is "it's too hard or not worth it to change", and that's fine. But that's not what was said... what was said is that it was "by design", which I always interpret to mean "by choice". And I would wager that any halfway decent user test would indicate that absent of any engineering consideration, hiding the slider knob was at bad choice by at least 8 to 1. If it were an easy choice to reverse, I just wanted you all to understand that you should. Anyway, perhaps I overstepped my role as "consumer" here, and you've gently reminded me of that. That's cool. I know now that I've been heard, and I apologize for any ruffled feathers.
Cheers,
Jeff