Thanks for your thoughtful reply Rick. Perhaps I can help further your thoughts.
As regards theatre view - I agree with you here. I don't tend to use theatre view much. In my eyes, theatre view is indeed suitable for users who just want to browse via album art thumbnail and play music.
The real power of JRiver however, is as a music collector's database. It has many excellent features such as customisable browsing of music via the node tree, flexibility of the main viewing screen and many other options. It is in this (standard view) that I would like to see these improved options for album art. Perhaps "most" users would not be bothered about the extra flexibility for album art, but many others would.
I appreciate your opinion that CDs are rapidly becoming irrelevant. However, a massive amount of purchasers of your software will still use it to rip, catalogue & play their CDs. CDs will remain available to customers for some time yet. There will always be a strong market for the whole package, i.e. album art, liner notes, etc. Having said that, with the advent of cloud storage etc, I imagine that this album artwork will move digital. Either way, it would be nice for JRiver to support a more flexibile and visual experience when it comes to album art.
Yes, as you say - the ability to associate more images with an album. And I would add, the flexibility to display these images within JRiver as required. You don't agree that two images should be shown simultaneously - I agree with you - I think it should be an option, not a default. And I agree with thumbnails, only one image would serve the purpose fine.
Overall, all that is required is a bit more flexibility of the main viewing window. When selecting an album from the node tree, it would be great if the main viewing screen could display the other artwork (particularly rear cover) etc. Shouldn't be too hard to program?
e.g.: