Ken,
I tend to use context mode mostly for 'doing', so I'm only viewing available actions anyway. Besides that, I never have the No Context bin selected: I don't want to see the inbox items, since I haven't committed to them; and tasks don't escape my inbox without a context.
This gets at why the current implementation doesn't actually do what I hoped it would for my workflow. I expected that having parents show up in context mode would let me retire my
Verify Next Actions Exist script. However, in day-to-day use I don't see any parents popping up in context mode, because I'm not viewing the No Context bin and none of my parents have a default context. (I don't use default contexts, because then tasks might automatically and accidentally get the wrong context.)
So, projects and groups still stall until my evening review when I run the script. If the script identifies a parent without an incomplete child, then I
am using the No Context bin to navigate to the item.
I still like a couple of the proposals in
this thread.
My proposal would probably be simpler to implement, but
jdh's is more flexible (assuming a default parent context preference). Either of the proposals would let me have context mode perspectives that showed stalled parents without showing the No Context items in my inbox.
In sum, I'm not personally getting much benefit from the new behavior. It's close but not quite discriminating enough to show the information I want. Based just on my own experience, I wonder whether the change in workflow required of users—and the attendant support costs of helping users through the transition—are worth the benefits. They might be, but implementing something that would allow viewing the parents while omitting the inbox items would make the difference for me.