Please don’t take this the wrong way. Yours is an obviously thoughtful post. But I sometimes think we must all be using different software and somehow we have arrived on this forum from alternative universes imagining we are talking the same language about the same topics. Here is an example.
I used to know how many versions of Beethoven’s 5th I have in my local library in 1.7 but I cannot tell you that anymore in 1.8 because roon no longer distinguishes the total for local and streamed content in my library. But the total versions of Beethoven’s 5th in my local library plus Qobuz I can tell you very precisely. Roon tells me it is 2,735 recordings of Beethoven’s 5th.
So now we have two issues to deal with. What version of Beethoven’s 5th will roon suggest for me when I do a search? The second problem is how in any meaningful way will roon present to me the 2,735 alternatives?
So from 2,735 possible Beethoven 5th’s what does roon suggest? Karajan, Bernstein, Abbado, Solti maybe. No! Lets go with a boyband. This literally amongst 2,735 alternatives is what roon’s Valance decided to give me.
Ok. So that’s a miss. You must get the frustration with that? I’d be interested to know that there is something unique about my library that amongst 2,735 possibilities this is the obvious Beethoven’s 5th for me. Incomprehensible.
Moving on, what else can I click on? Well this what I get:
This is the first 3 line items. There are 2,735 of them. Vertically scrolling to the bottom on my 15 inch laptop is about 20 meters. That takes about 40 mins a click at a time. Obviously no one in their right mind would do this. The point is, did anyone look at usability of the UI in terms of core Classical repertoire when scaled up to integration with a streaming partner? This is Beethoven’s 5th!
This is a lot of the reason why you are seeing such polarised views on the 1.8 release. Depending on genre and use case, 1.7 was already at the limits of usability for a significant number of roon users. Longstanding issues were not fixed and for many 1.8 is more clicks, more complexity, just to stand still.
To their credit roon appear to be bending over backwards to get 1.8 back to that borderline of 1.7 usability in the last couple of maintenance releases. Not really sure anymore where roon seem to be going. Time will tell I guess.