The future of Display Suite in 6.x

With all the focus on Drupal 7 and emerging work on Drupal 8, its easy to forget that there are still hundreds of thousands of Drupal 6 sites out there, four and a half thousand of which are running Display Suite. In fact, while the total number of Drupal 6 installs has been fairly flat for 12 months, Display Suite usage still appears to be growing, even for 6.x.

With that in mind, as the new maintainer of Display Suite for Drupal 6, Ive been focussing on two things:
* Resolving the outstanding issues with build mode storage and getting CCK multigroup support complete for 6.x-2.x
* Looking at revisions and new features to be included in a new 6.x-3.x branch.

I am close to wrapping up the major ds bugs preventing a final 6.x-1.x release and a 6.x-2.x-beta1 release, and I've updated the releases for Node Displays and Node Displays Contibutions last weekend with their latest round of bug fixes and features as well.

I've also been talking to a lot of people about their experience with 6.x and what they would like to see in a new version. There are still a lot of sites using it which won't be upgraded to 7 in the near future, so I've been looking at what functionality might be stopping them from getting full value out of it. The things which keep coming up are different layouts, more flexible field rendering options, exportable fields, exportable build modes, and more dynamic build mode switching options (especially for things like "sticky", arguments and so on). Additionally, there's some irritating outstanding issues with tabs, labels for some CCK fields, and views.

What would you like to see in Display Suite? Are there existing features which could be improved? Are there features which don't currently exist that you'd like to see?