Yes, I know, there's no such thing. And I don't want to see panes in Theater View—but I do miss the ability to browse randomly rather than hierarchically. I love the recent changes, but now it's so slick I find myself wondering, "Why can't it work this way?"
What I'm imagining is a roller bar functioning sort of like dropdown panes. It could be almost identical to how it works now, with the exception selections within categories would "stick" while moving to an "upstream" category (they would be "unstuck" by changing the selection back to "all"). The roller bar would show the item selected in each category, so one would know what they were looking at. And instead of working like breadcrumbs, any one of them could be selected to change which item is selected (i.e., left/right to navigate the bar without changing anything, down to select a category). In other words, categories would behave more like filters than tree branches.
I'm suggesting this "random browsing" be in addition to, not a replacement of the current hierarchical behaviour. The two would have to coexist without creating confusion. It could be a choice in the configuration of a view—so two views would be configured if one wanted both options. That would avoid confusion, but not be very convenient. Perhaps it could just be a roller bar selection (hierarchical ~ random) immediately after selecting a new view. It could default to the last setting so as to not slow things down for those who leave it set one way.
