Actually a combined PDF/edit view had been planned right from the beginning but we never actually did it. We are aware that the edit dialog itself can be improved (e.g with autocompletion see your post here)
We will re-think the complete workflow and keep that in mind. I like cover flow on the mac and use it all the time. The problem in the context of a wabapp is having readable thumbnails available for thousands of papers. It’s a performance issue and we don’t want to slow things down by adding this feature.