Rick, you and I may have differed on the mechanism for how to enable flexibility in the system, but I don't think we differed on what the system should be able to accomplish in the end.
I don't think so. What I argued for in the past had more to do with the fundamental structure of a system that would be simple and effective,
and provide a solid base for building on. Instead, a much more complicated and painful approach was taken—one that seems to based on the premise most users don't want any involvement whatsoever in the process. A Red October for video meta data perhaps. Unfortunately, the developers are not experts in matters of movie and TV meta data or the lessons learned by others in it's collection. They haven't much interest in such things, and apparently assume most users don't either. They may be right.
In any case, I'm sure incremental improvements will be made. But the groundwork has not been laid for a number of fundamental requirements. So things like a means for combining multiple sources in any manner and the expression-based mapping of the results to user-designated fields would likely involve scrapping or largely redoing what has already been done. I don't think that's going to happen.
Insomuch as it probably requires much of the same groundwork, it also seems less likely we'll ever see premium/paid data services like Rovi and Gracenote. That would be the ultimate for users who are
serious in their desire for something that 'Just Works'. I know it might be the case, but it's difficult to understand those who value on their time and sanity so as to choose fussing around with second-rate data and baffling 'automatic' retrieval routines—just to avoid paying another $20 per year. (I don't know what the cost would be, but surely it would be reasonable.)
I wish I was wrong. The
PVD/PVD Import solution isn't going to last forever. I haven't even held my breath long enough to see whether
PVD Import still works in MC 18...
