[whpalmer4]

I'm not sure I fully understand your proposal, but I'll comment on why I think the current setup makes sense.

But first, I'll point out that the view bar is by no means only useful in project mode -- if anything, I find it most useful in context mode. Not a single one of my context-based perspectives (from which I do almost all of the actual execution of work, as opposed to planning) has the default view bar settings.

Edit->Sort actually changes your document. The view bar simply changes your view of the data, not the underlying data itself. You can make actions appear in a number of different orders using the view bar, but if you further restrict the view to Next Actions only, they will appear in the same order (as you do them one by one) no matter what the view settings happen to be. Change the ordering via Edit->Sort and that may not be true. They aren't really interchangeable in the general case, and a user interface that led one to think otherwise would not be a good thing, in my opinion. It's pretty clear that when you reach for something under the Edit menu, that you are going to actually alter the document, right? Imagine spending an hour one day carefully planning out a big project with lots of sequential dependencies, getting everything just right, then blowing it all away because you inadvertently selected the one item in some part of the UI that actually changes the document, unlike all of its companions which only change the way the document is displayed?

I guess I should amend my comment in my previous post about improving the current UI to be that I haven't thought of a good way to make it less confusing for those of us (myself included) who learn how to use the program by fiddling with it without first reading (or watching) the documentation. In my opinion, the current behavior makes good sense once one understands that there are two different things going on, but knowing the difference is key, unless your data consists of nothing but parallel projects and single action lists.