As projects grow in complexity and material count increases, navigating through the Materials tab can be frustrating. As a workaround, I use tags and letters.
In line with SkyG’s recommendation, the integration of a hierarchical folder structure could serve as a straightforward yet effective solution.
This is sorely needed - on large projects the materials list quickly becomes an unmanageable mess. Just the ability to make folders inside of the materials tab to organize would be a huge improvement.
in V8 the materials can be searched and filtered, and you have the ability to add tags to materials. Does this solve the material management issue for you?
As the project goes on and on and importing a lot of different objects into it, the material panel becomes very long and uncontrollable. Folders just like Layers would be helpful.
Especially when you start to combine models - say you want to render a few different objects together - the materials tab just becomes an utter mess. You also end up with duplicate materials with similar names etc. This would be such a huge improvement.