I find that difficult to credit - I don't have any insider info., but that's not how Apple goes, for the most part. Also, if they were doing a total rewrite (as they did with FCP or iMovie) I would expect the outcome to be much more different from iTunes 10 than 11 is.

I doubt it's a clean break. Exhibit A: Just as in iTunes 10, entering manual music selection for an iPod Shuffle craps out the same 3 giant scrolling subviews in an L shape: http://i.imgur.com/CsXud.png

I do like the new dynamic background and highlight colours when selecting albums and tracks in the Album view.

It blocks the UI thread when generating thumbnails in the "video" tab... lots of small modal progress windows... really still feels like an OS 9 app at times.

It does seem like they removed the ability to open multiple windows though, which I always activated by mistake instead of on purpose.

At least the preferences dialog is the exact same modal crap it always was (What are they thinking?) and the metadata dialog is also unchanged since forever.

Looks like a coat of paint, nothing more. They are always so tantalizingly close to radically rethink everything. But they don’t seem to dare, and that’s sad.

It's not. It has an improved database engine and a new UI. That's pretty much it.