Thoughts on results vs select

I've been trying to understand the implementation of results (identify, from workflows etc), vs actually selecting features.  It feels like there is an unnecessary distinction between the two, and a disconnect between the results pane and highlighting features on the map.  Here are some random thoughts I have - I know lots of them have been covered elsewhere, but I just wanted to get them down on (e)paper.

• I want to be able to highlight what is in the results pane on the map.  For simple identifys this isn't so critical, as the user has just clicked the feature on the map, so knows where it is.  But I have workflows where the user supplies an attribute value (eg a neighborhood association), and 300 parcels are returned.  But they have no idea where they are on the map.  Hovering over each feature in the results pane isn't a viable option.  When I've shown new users how to use the workflow, once they've picked a neighborhood association, they have no idea what to do next.
• If the interface did include highlighting tools, there would need to be highlight all and clear all buttons
• Finer grained highlighting would be nice - select multiple records from the results pane for highlighting.  Similar to shift and ctrl selects in Windows Explorer or ArcGIS
• In the results pane, could we get an expandable tree of results by layer? Managing long lists of results is a bit of a nightmare.   It's hard to find the feature you want (this would make the Search tool soooo much more friendly).
• Ability to add/remove from a results set.  The user wants to identify two non-contiguous areas and run a report on them.  How would they do this?
• To take this further, if the user clicks on the Reports button, they can only run reports be graphically selecting features.  It would be really nice to have the option to run the report on a set of features in the results pane.
• All this functionality should be able to run on results set in the history tab.
• Is there a reason why we can't right click on a result feature(s) and run a report from there?  Why do we have to select the feature first and do it through the selection pane?  You can buffer directly from the results pane.
• Selecting features by clicking the star is unintuitive.  Selecting multiple features is very difficult.
• Why differentiate between results and selections at all?  I'm sure there are reasons, but for me, the whole select functionality is superfluous.  Why not just bring all the functionality into the results pane?  Our users want to select a bunch of taxlots, view their attributes, run reports, and print maps.  Why can't all this be done from the results pane?
• Can we please get an attribute query builder.  How would a user go about identifying all the taxlots in a given subdivision?  I've written a workflow to do this, but it would be nice to have a generic out of the box tool.  Our users won't have a clue how to do this without training.

Anyway, these are some of the things I'm trying to work through.  We go live with our internal site in a couple of weeks, and I'm sure our users will find lots of creative ways to confuse themselves :-)

Chris