Rockbox

Are you aware of the quick-menu to easily turn shuffle off and on?

yes i am

So you're basically making a feature requests to save about 4 keypresses?

the problem isn't turning shuffle off/on

it would just be convinient if it could just to a "quick shuffle and play" instead of turning on shuffle, going to the database and selecting a song

Have you tried simply doing an "Insert Shuffled" on a category?

no...can you do it on the entire list of tracks?

Even so, that would still require going to the database 1st.

I don't know if you have ever used the apple firmware. If you have, you will notice how convinient it is to have a shuffle option on the main screen

You never mentioned it being on the main menu. Even if it's on the main menu, that doesn't increase the number of button presses it would save you, as you'd probably have to scroll down past the database to get to it anyway. It'd still only save you about 4 presses.

You might find the "Play Selected First" setting useful if you don't want to randomly select the first song yourself. I think the basic response to this is going to be: Not everyone would use this feature (me, for example) and it would therefore clutter up the main menu for people who don't use it, and given that there are a variety of easy ways to do it otherwise, the negatives outweigh the positives.