Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions

There are two things I do with a music player: (1)Select tracks from the collection, (2) edit the playlist (and play!). While Amarok 2.1 is better than 2.0 in some respects, it doesn't do neither well.

My 3 big sour grapes with Amarok 2:

1. That second pane, where one can see Wikipedia entries. As far as I am concerned that is simply feature creep. I never used it, never added any applet to it, and it still sits there taking a ridiculous amount of space. Unnecessary unwanted feature that a user cannot get rid of (i.e. I can't reclaim that space).

2. The play controls moved to the top *right*. I don't know where the Amarok devs look at right before starting to play something, or skipping a song. *I* will normally checking the playlist. Amarok2 has managed to place the playing controls as far away from the playlist as possible.

3. All choices are placed vertically when browsing the collection. Didn't these folks never used gtkpod (or rhythmbox and iTunes for that matter)? I never found anything as good as gtkpod to select tracks from a music collection.

Perhaps one or two iterations forward Amarok will be as popular as before, or perhaps many of its old users, not wanting to spend a year with a non-functional player, will already have settled on something else in the mean time.