This recent change has raised a lot of concern.
It has not affected me so much due to the fact that I do most of my tagging via panes, where I always have check boxes.
I don't know if it will help or frustrate even more, the intention is to help, but perhaps a change of workflow needs to be considered?
You could create a view scheme specifically to be used for tagging that includes a keywords pane.
Tip:
The keywords pane is only populated with the tags that are present in the current list. I worked around this by creating a custom library field that I then used for grouping the list.
For example: Create a custom, calculated data, library field using:
if(isempty([keywords]),Not Tagged,Tagged) and then group your list by this new field. All the untagged keywords files will be grouped together making them easily obtainable, and because all the 'already tagged' files are also in the list, grouped together out of the way, the keywords pane contains all existing keywords, making tagging the untagged files pretty simple, just press F4 and tick the boxes.
I don't typically keyword my audio files, but use the field for
everything for image files...
Checkbox heaven!! (click image for full size view)The new list field handling system comes with many keyboard shortcuts that should help speed things up, but I'm not sure what they are and would need to search them out. What would be handy would be if someone au-fait with these shortcuts could put them all together in one post that could be bookmarked for reference... anyone?
-marko.