If there were a "bugs/suggestions" group for this, I'd post there. If there is and I'm not seeing it, please feel free to gently direct me in that direction but in the meantime, it seems like this is the only place to post suggestions.
It seems as though the UI folks don't like checkboxes too much, Everywhere I'd expect to see a checkbox I see an On/Off dropdown. Including the move of the focus to the dropdown, this requires three mouse presses and you have to physically move the mouse twice (one unavoidable time to set the focus). Checkboxes require one unavoidable mouse movement toset focus and only one click. For the standard editors, this isn't a huge deal where these on/off boxes is only occasional. But when you're trying to determine the impact of various effects in an MSG patch, it's really annoying to have to spend more than three times as long as should be necessary turning off all the effects and then again to turn them back on. This seems like the best way to understand the MSG patches and to understand MSG at all so this is a big hindrance.
I'd love to see all the on/off combos in the MSG editor turned to checkboxes. I can't see this as being too awfully difficult unless there's just a philosophy of "all UI should be consistent" which is a generally good rule, but in this case I think it's overruled by common sense - at least in my opinion.
Loving the product, though! Please don't hate me! :)
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Things like mutes in MSG or PASeq action step lists used to be implemented with check box controls in Studio Artist prior to version 4.
When we ported to our cross platform framework for version 4 there were some obscure issues associated with controls in lists and the framework that lead to why we switched over to using the popup controls that are there now.
I'd be happy to take another look at that whole issue in the context of our version 5 development.
The development code for the next version already has some improvements associated with the mechanics of MSG editing.
I've been thinking about this a little in the context of muting the status of a msg processor. I was wondering if an option to switch the processor to a passthrough option in addition to just turning it off would be useful? So in addition to just turning a processor off, you could switch it to just pass through it's input to it's output. This make sense for some processors more than others of course.
The point behind it is that manually switching a msg processor on or off tells you something about what is going on in the processor chain. But depending on the IO routing for an overall msg effect, you can effectively disable more than one processor since you might disrupt the whole stream flow when turning off a single processor (if it's output IO streams never get initialized to something). Offering a passthrough option might make things easier when adjusting processor status settings to try and figure out what is going on in a msg preset.
Of course the existing popup approach then makes adding this kind of additional status change option more straighforward than a checkbox.