Gonna unpack these in small groups. I'll start with things I believe the client already does or will do soon.

when I click a band tile, the “Albums” icon is too small. Ideally have album tiles horizontal along the bottom, but at least make the icon bigger and put next to Instant Mix

If the artist has albums, you should be able to press down on the remote to get to the album section without having to use the left icon menu. That menu is really only there to help people like me who have some artists with dozens of albums and I don't want to have to press up through all of them to get back to the top. It's a little jump menu.

Instant Mix is confusing, it seems to be shuffle just name it shuffle, and if you hit shuffle from a band details I’d expect it to shuffle just that band, vs “Shuffle All” from main screen, or Shuffle album from album details, etc.

Instant mix is kinda like a radio play option. It generates a playlist based on the band you're on. To play all the songs by the selected band, press the Play button on their artist page. To shuffle play the artist, currently you can press the play button on their artist page then enable shuffle mode.

The upcoming 2.0 release will provide a new option where you can simply press the play button on your remote and it will shuffle play all the songs by the currently highlighted artist.

The rest is probably just me needing to get used to the playback button design, like pushing up I’d expect to see progress bar and some quick functions but instead I see file info which doesn’t seem like a common thing I’d care to look at. Similarly, being able to click the progress bar and skip to a time would be wonderful vs hitting “right” a hundred times on my crappy Roku remote.

The upcoming 2.0 release replaces the playback info and subtitle select popups with an OSD (on screen display). It has buttons to play/pause, skip by chapters, a chapter list, and the moved playback info and subtitle select popups. It also shows you where you are in playback (but this bar is not selectable due to technical reasons - thanks Roku 👎

Here are bugs you've identified.

overlay band name on band tile. I know the name is up top, but I don’t recognize a lot of those tile pics and have to go one by one trying to find the right one.

There is a setting to always show the titles on the items. On the home view press *, then go to Settings / User Interface / Libraries / General / Grid View Settings / Item Titles. Ensure this setting is set to Always Show. In your music library you will see titles for all your artists, but only if you're using the Artists (Grid) view - accessed by pressing * while in your library. The titles in the Artists (Presentation) view aren't honoring this setting. That's a bug 🐛

Here are new features you've identified that I'll made enhancement tickets for so we can work on them in the future.

also a “all songs” next to “albums”.

Create a new section that shows a selectable list of all the artist's songs.

when playing and play/pause is focused, if I could push “up” to focus the progress bar, and then left/right to fast fwd/rewind, or “ok” btn to enter a time to skip to (think, where I left off in this 20 hour long audiobook)

This has been on my mind ever since I first wrote the audio player. It's coming once we get the last of what I call "the foundation" items completed. In a nutshell, we needed the behind the scenes code to be improved before we could jump into adding more "advanced" functions to the audio player.

Movies section had some nitpicks too. Like wishing there was a quick bar when you focus a movie, or at least putting “un/mark watched” in the asterisk menu instead of having to drill into it.

We've had other people mention a similar menu in other locations. We've started calling it a context menu. We need to think more about how it interacts with existing * menus and all that, but it's another good idea.

Hope you found my complaining useful!

Very helpful, thank you!