I can certainly understand (and appreciate) the development team's dedication to preventing "option bloat". Having a Preferences Dialog with 8,000,000 tabs and checkboxes is the quickest way to turn people off to a new system. Some power users, like me, love them, but to most people it's just confusing.
However, isn't there a way we could have the best of both worlds? I, personally, don't care at all if the Action Window remember's it's state (it takes one click to minimize it), but people do ask for this feature a lot. However,
I ask for weird options all the time that would be VERY useful to some people (and admittedly not to many others).
If many of these "rarely used" options were implemented in an XML settings file that MC used, or implemented in the Windows Registry (I would definitely vote for #1), the "super-power-users" we would be able to more completely customize our interface without bloating the standard Preferences Panel. In fact, you could actually even streamline the existing panel a bit more if there was this "extra-advanced" method of modifying the application's behavior! (And then some extremely helpful user like KingSparta or I would come along and design an application that modifies the archaic XML settings file for us and everyone would be happy.)
This model is used in all kinds of applications, from SageTV to Firefox to Windows itself (what is the Registry for after all). Why not?