[Patashu]

OK I was thinking
firstly ever notice how as the judgements get better the words get longer?
marvelous
perfect
great
good
boo

well it made me think; the more feedback a game gives back to you and the less you have to do to process it the faster you can get better at it (think stuff like tetris the grand master 3 playing a unique sound depending on what piece is next), so what I propose is a pro-timing based system that makes the judgement as detailed as possible.
ideally it would be applied per column, but one for the whole thing should be fine.
it would have two components; one is that the length of the judgement would go up linearly proportionally to how far your hit was from the true note placement, the other is that the colour would change along a gradient at the same time, again linearly, but it would go in a different direction depending on whether you hit early or late.
early would go like this: white for spot on to aqua green for about perf to aqua for about great to lightish blue for about good to deep blue or purple for about boo
late would go like this: white for spot on to lime green for about perf to lime for about great to yellow for about good to orange for about boo
there might not even need to be a distinct set of timing windows any more; all you need is a 'best' timing cutoff beyond which it would still give the visual effects but not grant any more points, a combo breaker cutoff if it still exists (alternatively, just a point at which a hit stops gaining life and starts losing it) and a 'worst' timing cutoff, akin to the far end of boos now. again, within that we don't necessarily NEED to have timing windows; we could just display the results as a frequency graph and show the average path through it. alternatively we could just subdivide it finely or something

anyway the problem with perfs, greats, etc now is that if you just get one you don't immediately know if it's early or late, if it's in the middle of the window or almost one better or almost one worse. the boundaries between timing windows are essentially arbitrary so this makes more sense to do and provides better feedback. for instance sometimes I find myself cb rushing a trill, but I cannot just at a glance determine if I am a note ahead or a note behind on it, and on which column or both; with column specific judgments that showed different colours or some other indication of being early or late I could very easily adjust myself to hit on time again

also for some reason I play better when the 'star' type target flashes turn on, so maybe have something like them turned on at all times

also turn off O.K.s they're just spammy and annoying lol