What I'd like to see is a menu system that learns the patterns of usage that it user carries out. Say, every time a menu item is selected (at any level), a count is incremented to indicate a "Hit".

As the statistics build up, the menus then re-arrange themselves with the most used first under the selection key.

Example: Say my most frequent menu choice at the top level is "Playlists", the second most frequent "Sound" and the third "Power Off". Playlists will appear as the default selection under the remote's * key, with Sound to the right and Power Off to the left. To select my most popular menu choice I then have to just hit Enter to step to the next menu level. To get my second popular, I press (right)(enter) and third it's (left)(enter). The most effort in terms of finger (thumb) movement is therefore the least popular choice of the three, the minimum affort the most popular.

After I've hit Sound, then at this menu level, the most popular choice is again directly under the (enter) key (for me at the moment, this would be Equaliser), so to step rapidly down the menu structure just becomes a sequence of minimum button selections.

At the moment, these two examples are pretty close to the actual, rigid menu structure. However, if dynamically configurable menus that re-configure themselves based on usage statistics were available, there would be a subtle improvement in the structure due to statistical tuning as the user uses the unit (it would also mean that everyone's directory structure could turn out different due to different usage patterns).