Graham Snyder's dashboard

nPHYN1T3, thank you, you've raised most of the main issues I have with songbird. Though your style is... interesting.
I don't agree that the web browser is a redundant feature; when I'm browsing my library or using the program a lot I find being able to flick to a webpage without switching apps quite handy - I often have music-related sites like last.fm or guitar tabs open in songbird. However, I do agree that it's not a *necessary* feature of the program, and certainly shouldn't be the main point of focus considering the state of the music player side of things.
With regard to your points on GUI customisation, hideability of the sidebar, current playlist, lack of customisation options in general and other missing key features like minimize to tray, I wholeheartedly agree. As it happens I think things like the album art display, concert alerts, etc are nice to have - but I agree that there should be a way to remove or at least hide these sort of things, which is currently lacking.

At the moment I'm holding out hope that songbird will continue to improve its core functionality to a level where I've no desire to use anything else; however, 1.1.1 is still uncomfortably buggy (particularly the Now Playing List addon, which mightn't be so broken if it were core functionality like it ought to be), and is still missing important features like multiple watch folders and secondary sort options.
Until recently I used iTunes because of my iPod; before that I used winamp, and as soon as I switched I missed winamp's customisability. At the moment Songbird doesn't have the nice-to-have pretty features of the one (or at least not working very well) or the customisability of the other, but is nice enough and has enough potential that I don't really want to switch back to either itunes or winamp. So I'm waiting, and time will tell whether that potential ever becomes realised.

Is this supposed to be fixed in beta 3? It's still broken for me.

I'm glad to see watch folders are going to be in Hendrix, sounds great :) but automatic library organisation would be even better. If you want an idea of how it should work, I seem to remember JuK for linux had a really nice implementation which allowed you to easily change the folder structure and file naming scheme. It's been several years since I last used JuK or indeed linux though so I'm not sure whether it's changed, or even whether it's still being developed.
If/when this idea is implemented, it's important that the organisation/filename scheme is customisable - this is the only reason I don't use the automatic organization in itunes (other than the fact that my library's split been my computer and an external drive because don't have enough space for all of it on my computer, and itunes can't cope with multiple music folders).