I assume this is a widely held belief since there is no way this software is liked by anyone who actually attempts to use it. I have an extensive library of music, most of which was pulled from vinyl or CD by me, and nearly all of which I have laboriously tagged and organized. Not only does iTuned start very slowly (even on a newish dual-core laptop with 2GB of RAM) but trying to add my library to the iTunes library takes nearly an hour. If that was a one-time cost, I guess I could live with it, but as I rip more of my CD collection and add new music (from outside iTunes) I have to repeatedly manually add folders or readd the whole library. Why can't iTunes monitor folders? (MediaPlayer and other solutions can!)
All that aside, I find the interface to pretty much blow. I am not an Apple fanboy (obviously) so I can say with a fair amount of certainty, that this interface is not an innovation or an improvement over anything else out there. Library navigation is impossibly slow and honestly, the fact that I can't easily replicate my tried and true organization is frustrating. I understand that the designers believe their organization is what I should use, but they're wrong, and it is annoying. I don't want everything only visible by tag, as Dave Matthews, Dave Matthews Band, Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, The Dave Matthews Band, and Dave Matthews Band and Phish all are in one folder for me. Changing the artist doesn't help because it creates inaccuracies. So now I have to manually create playlists to recreate my organization structure -- damn you iTunes.
I would have thought that folder organization was pretty common when creating a library of music -- am I alone here?