I’d tend to disagree - though it very much depends on what the ‘sweet spot’ actually is. The truth is that media players are never perfect, but can bring interesting additions to ‘just playing media’.
For example, the ability to open a cue-flac in Deadbeef, then export individual tracks in any format you wish made it an automatic ‘best media player’ for many tasks… made it very simple to play and import tracks to your music library (using Picard for the import).
Guayadeque had the best layout of any media player (meaning flexible, editable, and with options to save layouts for different tasks - as can QMPlay2 - which in it’s heyday I found to be far superior in just about every way…
Now Strawberry works well, but has the same sucky interface almost as horrible as Clementine and probably very similar to Amarok… it’s main saving grace being the smart playlists, but the interface is best hidden when playing, unless you enjoy having most of the space taken up by the playlist instead of the media playing/information.
Anyone remembering the Guayadeque ‘LastFM’ panel (which pulls relevant information, and lists related tracks , with tracks in your library highlighted) and the configurable ‘Lyrics’ panel (which you could make the main panel, edit the font to suit, and if no lyrics are displayed offered buttons to 1. Search in the app 2. Open a search in Firefox and 3. Edit/paste your own - they lyrics being embedded in the track if you set this in preferences)…
Such people will certainly agree and understand why Amarok was certainly overruled by it in terms of ‘best media player’.
In other quarters, I’ve seen other players touted as ‘outstanding in all respects’ - but experimenting found them uncomfortable to use (like Tauon - I never liked it, though it did look cool and I guess had some interesting UI - sadly not configurable enough).
I’ll be interested to see how Amarok plans to improve on the Strawberry experience, and avoid falling into such traps and complications to bloat it out - like trying to include podcasts and radio stations being built in… something that Strawberry did well, as I’m more than capable of managing a ‘playlist’ m3u file with radio stations on it, and adding new ones by searching radio-browser.info myself.
What I will find disappointing is if it simply wants to play to the fanboys.
