Next the build quality is so shoddy, it makes me think that they are made in Malaysia with no quality assurance. The power backlight button on mine is on an angle and the plastic molding around the volume buttons seems crummily put together.

Wow, even the beta units I saw (before the manufacturing was finalized) did not display these characteristics. I find this report very surprising. Do you have a digicam and can take photos of these flaws? I think the team would be very interested in seeing them. I don't think it's supposed to be that way, they went to great lengths and many hardware revisions to be sure that these things did not happen.

with the EXTREMLY buggy RMM

I've seen some reports of specific bugs, but can you please list the bugs you're talking about? Again, the team would like to hear them in hopes of correcting them. And please know that they ARE listening and are very interested in making it work well.

Why oh why is everything on the player zipped (Documentation, Software).

This has been discussed and I believe it will be corrected in the next firmware update.

WHY DO I NEED TO KEEP TYPING IN THE IP ADDRESS OF THE PLAYER?

Mike is here, he's listening, there's no need to shout at him.

Also, why the password?

Because if it's plugged into ethernet, anyone on the network can see it, get to it, and modify its contents. That's very important.

Also, it seems odd that I am unable to listen to music while I am transferring music.

That's odd. It used to be able to do this. Hmm, I just checked, you're right, it keeps going into that "Communicating" screen. In some cases you can press the stick and it will start playing again, but it depends on what's going on on the player.

RMML shows tracks on the player, that I can not access with the player.

I'm sure Mike would be very interested in working with you to see what caused this. That's not supposed to happen and the beta team did lots of different kinds of song loads to make sure stuff like this didn't happen.

Where are my install options when I install RMM.

This was discussed at length with the beta group. RMM is actually three separate programs, and there is a master installer that installs all three. The choice was made to make it simple and pester-free for the installation instead of prompting you for the installation location three times.

Plus, why am I “not permitted” to drag and drop music to my device? COME ON MAN!

I agree with this one, and it's a "known issue" that hopefully will be corrected in a future release. Note that you can drag and drop music onto RMM in some situations but not others. For instance, I can drag an MP3 file from Windows Explorer onto the Rio Karma icon and it will work. But if I try to drag a parent folder of MP3s onto the Rio Karma icon I get a strange unrelated error message. Both of these options work on RMML, it's only a problem in the main RMM.

When I fast forward in the song using the wheel, why does the music stop playing?

Hmmm. Which version of the software are you running? I don't see that problem. Of course, I'm running the internal software build that'll be available to you soon, so perhaps this is a bug that's been fixed.

Lots of times when I am in the UI and scrolling down the wheel just stops and I have to scroll up so it will continue down and vice-versa.

This sounds like one of the known bugs that's going to to be fixed in the upcoming firmware update.

unless I find some features that REALLY blow me out of the water

Okay, here's one (hopefully)...

Press the stick (using it like a button, not like a directional stick), and it will switch the playback screens. Do this until you reach the screen that shows the list of playing songs. It's the screen that resembles the empeg's "now and next" screen, if that helps.

Now, roll the wheel up and down to reach a different song. Then press on the wheel.

Now you have a menu of all the things you can do to this "spot" in the playlist. You can jump forward to this point in the playlist ("play"), you can insert and append songs from your library into the playlist this way, you can re-order the playlist (very fun, try it), etc.

You can then, if desired, SAVE this newly modified playlist as a real playlist on the player.

Here's another...

Menu, Equalizer, EQ mode, 5-band parametric. Then you can go into EQ setup and control all the parameters of the equalizer.

Anyway, those are my favorite features so far.