As I've mentioned before... I really, really think that some better default views for Theater View would go a long way towards solving the "Theater View is limited/ugly meme" as well.
While I agree that things could be improved with for example the default views, I do not think that would improve the impression of a "dull" Theater view very much. There's undoubtedly some tweaks that could be done to give users more useful views. But the fact is that theres so many different opinions about how things should be displayed, that we'll never get a great consensus here. Improved, yes. But how much?
I'm super convinced that there is one major thing that's lacking in Theater View today, when it comes to usability. One thing that would dramatically increase the user friendliness and usability aspects of Theater View. And that is Theater View options within Theater View it self. While most of the users of JRiver today deal with the fact that we have to create our own views in standard view to suite our own taste, this is by no means the normal way of doing daily operations in such interfaces of other applications. Most users would not know where to begin to create their own views or customize what's there. To attract the "normal" casual users things needs to be simple, and at the same time we have to maintain the options for the veteran and experienced users.
Options in theater view could be an item on the roller of each view. Which gave the users the ability to dynamically add certain criteria to each view. For example, people could have a few views with some good default settings. They could easily filter out watched items with the options. They would select their wanted genre of movies. They could sort movies from highest to lowest TMDB score and so on. All such settings should be temporary within a MC session, and reverted back to the default view settings when MC close. It should even revert to defaults when users change. So everyone starts with the same defaults, and can customize from there on, to suite their needs.
How complicated would such a thing be? I don't know. It's certainly doable. Other Media Centers does it. I don't think it would even be that hard to have such rules applied on the fly over the existing view rules? It would certainly give the users a super powerful tool to customize based on their need right then and there. Adding this to a skinning framework, and allowing adding and editing those functions for skins would be even better. It could open up a new world of possibilities.
That's my opinion anyway. If anyone cares to go off the green MCE button and Zone route
