I could understand it if they used Gnome2 as the foundation, and added to it, but they didn't.
That makes so little sense I can hardly believe you actually wrote that. Basically, the major (visual) change between Gnome 2.32 and Gnome 3.0 is that Metacity and gnome-panel have been replaced by Gnome Shell, in the default configuration that is. Did you really think that the Gnome developers put thousands of man-hours of development effort in the trash and started over from scratch?!
I open a Konqueror window w/ the folder that has those music files - be they mp3, wma, m4a or whatever, and I just put my cursor on the file - don't even open it. As long as my cursor is on top of it, the song in question plays. If I move my cursor away from that file, it instantly stops. If I wanted the playing to be uninterrupted, I'd go ahead and open the file in question w/ the music player of my choice - and under KDE, there are some 6 or more of them, not counting the video players. It's not doable under Gnome 2
Funny that you should give that as an example. Nautilus has been doing the same thing since at least 2004, probably earlier.
"Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet." -- "Visionaries" cartoon