I was told in this thread that the UI kinda stinks.

I had a play with it - looks pretty good. WMP 9 is a massive improvement over previous versions, with a lot of genuinely cool features such as this one. Unfortunately I think there are still fundamental UI design mistakes, and much of the glue underneath (such as WMDM) is a total hack.

Unfortunately the major WMP competitor is Real, and I don't want to get started talking about their product.

Rob