I don’t see the issue. Roon handles on-disk music no differently to how it handles streamed content added to your library. Discovery is naturally going to focus on the stuff you don’t have, and Roon can only do that if you’re hooked up to a streaming service.
I accept that Roon Radio will of course have limitations when it can’t trawl a streaming service for content to play.
What I’d like to see is that those without streaming enabled are not ignored as future functionality is developed. As long as Roon enables me to see and explore the links between performers in my library in a manner that’s functionally on par with what you get when streaming there can be no issue.
Whether you stream or not Roon is already using the community’s listening habits and relationships to expose your content to you e.g. popularity is listing the stuff that’s in your local library that Roon’s subscribers most listen to:
Now, whether I want my tastes to converge on the community’s lowest common denominator or not is a different question…but we’re all being treated the same on this front, except that streamers would likely get a different result that includes music you don’t have in your library.
Roon Radio for non-streamers of necessity behaves differently, albeit I’d like it to go out to Roon’s cloud and keep pulling recommendations until it finds something that is in my on-disc only library. Perhaps that’s too much traffic and server load for little benefit, who knows. Bottom line for me re Roon Radio is it’ll never be as good as something that actually has insights into the acoustics of the tracks in your library…and that’s a limitation of the cloud model unless the streaming services were prepared to do the analysis and make the results available to Roon. Seeing as such a system would not benefit Roon’s streaming customers I doubt we’ll ever see something like this implemented unless it’s developed by a 3rd party, open source and easily implemented by Roon … e.g. AcousticBrainz
One area where I feel Roon is being lazy and as a result actively discriminating against on-disc only customers is showing content like:
for artists that are well represented in a user’s on-disc library. I can’t see why Roon wouldn’t parse the data it’s fetching from its cloud infrastructure against your on-disc content, showing you the matching content. Parsing that list should be trivial.
Outside of examples like that above, I don’t think Roon is treating on-disc content any differently. Its beauty lies in its interface and the manner in which your content is unlocked and presented, ready to be explored.
All those calling 1.8 a disaster are in my view being overly precious and can’t be taking the time to explore just how rich Roon’s exploration capabilities now are. Sure, there were some issues on release that triggered some downtime for a portion of users, but it was resolved as soon as Roon had the data to enable them to identify and address the root cause. Don’t like the colour schema, change it - there’s no UI to enable it (yet?), but the ability is there, so change it however you fancy. Don’t like the fonts, you’ll get used to them. It’s not bug free (something this complex never is, but there are no showstoppers I’m currently aware of stopping me browsing, exploring and playing my on-disc or streamed music. Frankly, as much as some aspects do frustrate me, there is nothing I’d rather use.