I should clarify that removing it wasn’t a decision taken lightly, and it would be nice to have something available like this in the future. It’s just that ideas for that were tabled a long while back, and since there hasn’t been a single peep about its removal up until yours, it just dropped off the radar in my mind anyway. It’s not a technical problem (that was already solved with 1.x), so much as an interface problem. Because the Corkboard, Outliner, and Scrivenings views are all integrated together to work consistently, dropping items from one view based on a filter would reduce the quality of that consistency. Perhaps a better route would be a special selection tool that removed items from the current selection if they are or are not compiled—then you could from that selection go to a Scrivenings session—and since it would be a multiple selection, that same collection of items would be available in Corkboard and Outliner views—this giving you a way to view a filtered “Binder” in the Outliner. It’s an interesting idea, but kind of a really special purpose feature. Hmm. Could have a broader appeal perhaps.
Anyway, I wouldn’t say, ‘give up all hope’, that’s for Keith to say, but if some nice way of doing this that didn’t compromise the integrated model that Scrivener 2 uses came along, I think it would be nice to have it again.
Oh and don’t worry, you didn’t come across as grumpy to me. I think the solution above is going to be the best, even though it involves using another piece of meta-data as well as the checkbox, since you can’t search for the checkbox.
Or maybe, to work back from the feature idea above, use the Outliner as a filter. You can use an Outliner as a “soft filter” by sorting by column. If you turn on the Include in Compile column in Outliner, you can then sort by it, filtering all excluded documents to the top; included to the bottom (click the column header again to reverse). So from there just select the block that matches the session you want to see, press Cmd-Opt-O to remove everything from the Outliner that isn’t selected, and hit Cmd-1. Poof.
A few steps instead of two, but if the Outliner is already set up right with this column, not a big hassle. As a bonus you get a corkboard with only book elements, too. Once the structure of the book settles down, you could create a Collection out of these and use it as a manuscript-only working area.