Idea for new main menu item

This could also be go in the developer's mailing list, but since that seems relatively inactive, and there is also a "user" aspect to this discussion, I'll start it here.

Sparked by this post http://musescore.org/en/node/14629#comment-50627, I have come to think there are certain things that might currently seem to be best done via a plugin, but that perhaps should better be done within the program itself. A number of these form an identifiable category of features that could be roughly described as "things that operate on a whole selected region and have a fairly profound effect on the score". The feature discussed in the aforementioned thread - a diminution / augmentation facility - falls into that category. I think the export and import plugins belong to that same category. I think the existing "Transpose" facilities, which currently lives in the Notes menu, probably belongs in this new category as well.

So my idea is that there could be a new top level menu "Transformations" (or whatever) that was designed to be a place where these types of features would live. Putting them in their own dedicated menu makes sense to the user, I think. But it also might make sense architecturally, as these operations could conceivably all share similar data structures and a core "loop through all notes in selection performing the following operation" algorithm. It could be architected in a way that was almost plug-in like, in that a programmer could go in and add functionality there with minimal fear of introducing problems elsewhere. His changes to the application source would be isolated to that one file, with some assurance that while the feature might or not might actually work, at least he was not breaking anything else. In that sense, it is like writing a plugin, but the advantage would be full access to the applications regular objects and methods.

I see this as a big advantage to me personally, but probably to other programmers as well who might be considering the possibility of getting into the code but are still rather afraid of having to really understand the entire architecture before getting started, and then still never really being sure if anything we add might break something else.

But if it were just about that, it wouldn't be worth it. As stated up front, I also think it makes sense from a user perspective to have a single menu from which these types of transformation can be applied, and I think there are already a good handful of candidates for populating that menu.