My two cents on this (which is a philosophy I adopted soon after the beta, and forgive me if I sound like a broken disc-spinner) is/was, “Well (I said to myself), Welcome to Life on the bleeding edge of a new technology”. I’ve been both an early adopter of various things and a wait-and-seer of others throughout both my professional career and personal use of audio and video.
I found a way to live with the DMP (it’s a digital Turntable - put on a disc, get it spinning, and sit back and enjoy) because I can natively play my SACDs and SACD rips on DVD-ROM to an external DAC via I2S, and I like what it does sonically so much.
I am in no way making excuses for the functionality. I just learned to accept it and enjoy the fruits of the technology from a music quality perspective. Beyond the beta, and my decision to keep it, why make myself nuts over it? If they fix it, great, if not - I’m still OK.
Of course a caveat on that re: my particular usage is that I’ve never cared if the screen art functioned and so on (rarely have connected it to a network, etc.) so I totally understand if various aspects are of greater import to others.
Being a video and audio producer, and someone who has made DVDs and BDs, I recognized fairly early on that if there was to be no traditional visual navigation interface via an externally connected “TV” or monitor screen, as with a DVD player playing a DVD-A, it would perforce be limited in its ability to do whatever anyone wished. There are far too many variables in how this navigation can be implemented.
I however agreed with the decision to NOT have a TV-screen-based interface for two reasons - I don’t want the video circuitry mucking up the sound, AND I never cared for the DVD-A format because I didn’t want to have to turn on the effing TV to get the disc to play. I just wanted to listen to music. This is despite the fact that there are perfectly awesome-sounding DVD-A’s.
Side Note: When the Great DVD-A/SACD (the then high-ish-res PCM compared with Redbook, Vs. What we would now call “1x” DSD) Debate was The Thing, I would occasionally fire up the TV or projector to get tracks going on DVD-A. Eventually I came to feel that Devices and DAC chips built around one architecture or the other were better at doing one or the other than a typical given “Universal Player”. And this is to say nothing of the provenance of source files, blah, blah. But I digress.
Personally, I would rather have Paul (and other brave souls) push the boundaries, wildly succeed in some areas and perhaps fall short of some of the goals, than not try.
My two cents, YMMV, etc.