It is meant to be an efficient quick tool used while painting, not a solution to brush organizing.
Yeah, it’s spot-on. Considering your use cases:
I don’t know about you but to me literally nothing could be quicker and more convenient that then current “revolver” arrangement. Having to mess around with a grid with groups sounds like a nightmare when I really just want to paint without even thinking about it.
When I use the palette to change brushes it’s open for less than a second, I don’t think just pick the brush from muscle memory.
I think it’s better to completely decouple the pop-up palette and tags. The pop-up palette should be several empty slots that you can place the brushes in by drag-n-drop from docker. Creating new brushes/renaming brushes/reassigning tags should never affect the content of pop-up palette.