This is all well and good. But if you do any ongoing imports and tagging wth 11.1, the amount of work invested will only add up as time goes on. A month or so later, it won't be feasible to go back to 11.0
You have to make a real leap of faith here. No parallel path possible. It will be necessary to have a bunch of smartlists that can check for certain library parameters to give you an idea that things are ok. For example library size, number of album, last 20 albums imported etc. If you check these on an ongoing basis, it might keep your sanity intact.
True, but you can always go back to a known working MC11.1. It's not like JRiver typically expires their Beta versions. That's what I did early on with the MC10 and MC11 development builds. I typically hold off until they introduce enough new features I want and then make the jump. You can simply evaluate the first few versions (before you do build up a number of library changes), while keeping your archived MC11 library, and then decide yes/no. If you decide yes, and then they introduce a change that breaks stability (which is usually mentioned very quickly in the build thread -- wait a day before applying new builds), just don't do it. If you do, go back a few versions. No big loss. If they screw it up forever, just keep the old build that works!
Personally, I haven't yet made the jump. I'm still at the "waiting for new features to motivate me" stage. It seems that they have been mostly focusing on Portables thus far, which is fair enough (it's an important feature), but not something I use. I've still got an old Rio MP3/WMA CD player. I carry CD's, but not regular ones.
Eventually I'll get an iPod or something similar, but for now...