No, it's not more sexy but I just opened X3 to check something out and I noticed something right away when looking at the FX bins - eye strain.  That cyan text against the black background.  It was so hard to read.  Now with the black text on the light gray background, it is better.  It could use some more contrast but it is less work on my eyes.

I usually have the FX bin hidden on the Track View because I do all of my FX work on the Mixer view which floats on separate monitors but the FX bin in the TV is a thing of beauty.  The only niggle I see is that there is some header text across the top which displays the number of plugins in the bin.  I suppose that's supposed to help when you have the height of a track too short for all of the plugs to show up.  Unfortunately, on my screen, when the plugins are hidden, a scroll bar appears and a scroll up arrow appears and now the header text is truncated and it no longer shows the number of plugins in the bin.  Surprised that nobody caught that one though, it could be because of the resolution I'm using on my wall mount TV monitor.  I'll check that out.

Another thumbs up for improvements to the FX bins.
 
EDIT: I checked the resolution and it seems that the headers get shortened on my other monitors as well.  Maybe a different font size is needed?

Dave Modisette
Another thumbs up for improvements to the FX bins.

While I agree with your theme of the UI and workflow is better, and keeps getting better with each release, I have a gripe about the current FX bins. While they are great in Sonar Platinum and have been greatly improved, the gray shaded on/off needs improvement. It's very hard to recognize what's on and off. Hopefully an improvement there will happen soon. Plenty of comments on that in the Feature Requests section.

The FX bin on/off in fact is hard on my eyes.

I'd like to see them merge the pro channel and FX bins. It would free up space in console view and make it easier to concentrate. At least for me. YMMV.
 
Oh no, I just turned this thread into a feature request. Sorry, I feel a movement coming. Ooops, that didn't come out right either. Better go now.

I agree that there is way too subtle a difference between the on/off state of plugins in the new version.

Spencer
I agree that there is way too subtle a difference between the on/off state of plugins in the new version.

FWIW, I definitely felt that way initially. But now that I've logged so many hours with Platinum, I guess I've been "trained" because I'm not having the same problem.

I'll chime in that I've tried lots and lots of variations when you could REALLY custom color Sonar.  However, most of them became too clashy, too "colorful", or something else that got old very quickly.  There was one that REALLY looked like the "real thing"...or as close to a console as I've ever seen, but it had items I grew tired of seeing after awhile.  I really like the "stock" look of SPlat and don't really need to change anything.  Admittedly, I have two nice sized monitors, decent eye sight and don't need special situations, so I can see what's on the screen.  I know some struggle, because of various reasons, but I'm finding the battleship grey is really growing on me in a good way.  Some things that are subtle, like previously mentioned, I'm more aware of the differences after using the program, and so I don't need a bright, glowing on/off light.  I won't dismiss that a brighter one would be nice, but I think overall, the main template is a winner.

mixmkr
I'll chime in that I've tried lots and lots of variations when you could REALLY custom color Sonar.  However, most of them became too clashy, too "colorful", or something else that got old very quickly.

A term I recall when color displays were becoming widespread in computing was "angry fruit salad."