Thanks for that refreshing read. As an old film editor with a lot of Moviola/Kem experience I think these are some great architectural points.
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"The Moviola system "emulsifies" the film into little bits (individual shots)
and then the editor reassembles it out of those bits, like making
something out of clay. You take a little bit of clay and you stick it
here and you take another little bit of clay and you stick it there.
At the beginning of the process there is nothing in front of you,
then there is something in front of you, and then there is finally
the finished thing all built up out of little clay bricks, little
pellets of information."
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When you cut on Moviolas you cut all the pieces out of your stock with sound from bins. Sticking one after the other in order until you have a movie . This works great and fast and is actually quite fun. The problem arises with the inability work multi-track or  multi-camera.

Cinelerra is very much the Moviola system in that you have "The Viewer" and "The Compositor" This is  analogous to creating your clips in the Viewer and syncing up film sound on a sync block with a splicer , taping them together and dumping them into bins.

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"With the KEM system, I don't ever break the film down into individual
shots -- I leave it in then-minute rolls in the order in which it came
from the lab. In sculptural terms, this is like a block of marble -- the
sculpture is already there, hidden within the stone, and you reveal it
by taking away, rather than building it up piece by piece from nothing,
as you do with clay."
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 I used a first generation moviola flatbed , moving on to a 2 head Steenbeck. With 2 audio tracks you were working with four "chunks of marble" The beauty of this system is the ability to lock, unlock, and jog transport with impunity. Cut snip and move on down the line.   Now it's no longer the editing room it's the editing suite.

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"Computerized digital editing and, strangely enough, good old-fashioned
Moviola editing with an editing assistant, are both random access,
non-linear systems: You ask for something specific and that thing --
that thing alone -- is delivered to you as quickly as possible. You are
only shown what you ask for. The Avid is faster at it than the Moviola,
but the process is the same."
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Strictly from a user perspective to turn the room into a suitte here is how i would envision it.

Creating a new project would be essentially the same , separate windows for viewer, compositor timeline
With the Steenbeck you can click a button and shuttle something forward reverse click the button again and playback in sync.

When you add a video track, you should be able to open it up in a separate viewer. Use the viewer to jog back and forth lining up your shot then locking it to the master timeline control. Then instead of making clips and overwriting into the timeline just specify in, out points, being able to attach transitions to that point. wipe dissolve etc. That way comparative decisions are easier to make as well as change. The same should apply to audio as well. Playback transport that you can lock and unlock to the master timeline. Dragging a mouse over something and moving it one way or the other and seeing how it works is not the same  as running side by side. T his is where a midi jog wheel interface would shine.

Taking that concept one step further, The viewer itself should be a sub itertation of the whole program. Thus being able to make whole decision lists into "clips". This would vastly simplify dealing with large complex projects that need to be broken up into manageble chunks, ie: scenes.

My 2 cents.

Kind Regards,
Daniel Jircik
http://reggaecobras.com