I wish iTunes were a skinnable

It is.  I shared a link on how to do it above.

I wish it supported FLAC and OGG

I play those formats with iTunes as we speak.  Just as simple as installing this free XiphQT.  They have a free Windows version too.

I wish it didn’t suck memory like a 7 headed hydra…

I’ve used many other music players on my Mac over the years and all of them (that compare to iTunes) use more RAM than iTunes does after importing my huge library.  And, I haven’t had any issues with memory leaks whatsoever.  So you might want to investigate what’s wrong with your system.  Then again, you might be on Windows and may be screwed no matter what you do, I dunno.

shovel us all into walled garden/prisons.

Maybe with iOS, but I don’t use that.  I use the Mac OS and I very rarely ever use the App store.  It’s just an app I can choose to run or not for the most part.  I run whatever I want, whenever I want (including Windows XP, 7, 8 for testing, etc.).You’re only as “walled in” with any device as much as you allow yourself to be and the Mac OS is no exception.  And, I don’t even use the iTunes store to purchase music and my mp3′s, etc. work perfectly with it.  Once again, I’m not walled in… at all.

Excuse me…

MMMmmmm…. yessss?

why do this when you can browse the music through artists/albums already?

Take a closer look at my screenshot. I’m able to have a far more compact view of an entire band’s discography and quickly browse through my bands/albums with less scrolling than you do.

I’m also able to type the first few letters of the bands to jump to their folder without having to jump all the way over top-right to do a spotlight search or fumble with a bunch of extra space to get where I want while doing it (once again, check out how compact my albums and artists are).

It also works perfectly with my Smart Scroll prefpane that makes poking around my collection an absolute joy because of the added scrolling control, hover scrolling, etc..

Of course, sometimes I’ll change search methods and utilize smart playlists (sometimes in conjunction with my standard playlists), but that’s just another plus with using iTunes.

I only use playlists to select individual songs for working out or whatever

I use playlists for things like that too, but you’re missing out by not using them to organize your collection if you deal with a lot of band discographies like I do. I comb through my music collection faster with less effort. I’ve tried it your way and don’t like its various limitations.

And I hate the leather look. And until now, iTunes 11 is not being much my thing.

Can it play FLAC? Can I sort songs by BPM, Key, or other metadata? Finally, can it stream to a airtunes like device? Those are all features that every player should universally have had since 2005… 

I wish it supported FLAC and OGG, 
I wish it allowed sorting songs by other Metadata such as Key and Color, 
I wish it didn’t suck memory like a 7 headed hydra… 

Unfortunately, Apple does not have a history of listening to it’s users polite requests. Lately, it only seems interested in leveraging it’s marketshare massive money-bins of cash to shovel us all into walled garden/prisons.

sounds like a shitload of work

Wat?  Not at all..

To add an album:

 1) Click on band’s Playlist Folder, type “command-n” on Mac, Copy or type name of album into new Playlist that’s now within Folder.

 2) Drag n’ Drop music content folder into album’s Playlist created above.

 Done.

Metadata, etc. transfers automatically along with proper album song order, etc. Total mouse time: Approx. 5 seconds.

Creating a new band Playlist Folder is pretty much just as easy as well. I could do this automatically with an Applescript, but it’s so fast to do manually, why bother?

I will say this, I do HATE how iTunes handles individual equalizer settings. It should be much more user friendly that how it is now.

Maybe if you guys used it like I do, you’d like it fine.  I just make Playlist Folders for each band and then make Playlists for each album inside the Playlist Folders.

I can click on the entire folder and play all music from that band or individual albums if I click on those.   I then sort songs by however I want including some tricks with smart folders, etc.

iTunes is very customizable if you bother to try it.  You CAN change the skin of iTunes, BTW.  But, I haven’t bothered with changing skins since the early 90′s, hahah… what a bore…  I’m more focused on the music, I suppose…

Observe: http://i.imgur.com/luAO8.jpg

I think Apple hit it out of the park with this release.  All of the power-user features are still there, all of the old views are still there, and there are a number of new views as well that are great and make it less intimidating to me casual user.

And the new Queuing/recently-played UI is fantastic.

Apple did a wonderful job with one of their most important pieces of software.  It’s a masterful redesign.

And a lot of skeumorphic ideograms are hilariously anachronistic. Save is still represented woth a floppy disk, nobody uses real world filing cabinets at home anymore, and the most common use of paperclips in my house is to get dvds out of stuck drives.

Instead of putting lipstick on the pig, I wish Apple would actually look at all of what iTunes does (badly) and split the functionality into individual apps that would be more appropriate and useful.

Meanwhile iTunes tries to be more and more more graphical. Obviously I disagree with the Apple philosophy on this: cover art and music videos, I don’t care if I never ever see them again. Viewing by cover art has got to be the worst possible way to access a database.

It doesn’t always work, and there are many anachronistic ideograms used in skeumorphic interfaces these days, but to throw the whole concept out is a mistake.