I agree the movement of categories to below the fold stinks. I find it more annoying every minute I use it. But the labels for things have changed in a non-developer direction. If I were learning the Wordpress database structure now I’d be confused by the disjoint between the labeling of tables/fields in the database and the user interface.

In terms of your question about the usability/understandability the term “media”, I have a couple of comments.

First, Wordpress hasn’t had a concerted photo, video, sound management and upload tool before. To do these kinds of things in Wordpress, you had to be relatively savvy and often install plugins. The addition of this functionality is a really good thing.

Second, I think this is one of those concepts which is hard to term. We are talking about a term which represents a group of things (photos, videos, audio) which are similar but very distinct. I’ve always found developing good labels for this type of thing hard. People are happy to group the items together but have a difficult time coming up with a label that “makes sense”. (I wouldn’t be surprised if you focus grouped people and they called this grouping - Stuff I Uploaded or something else action oriented) I think the different icons representing the different kinds of media are a good way to indicate to people what the label is referring to. In an ideal world this wouldn’t be necessary but sometimes it is because words don’t do a good job or representing or describing things.

BTW - I checked out two other blogging softwares to see what terms they use for “media”. Blogger separates out photos and videos. While it provides a tool for uploading it doesn’t seem to have a management console for the items once they are uploaded. Movable Type uses the term “asset” for photos, video, audio. Like Wordpress, it provides a way to manage these objects once they have been uploaded.

I think the opposite is true: WP is becoming more developer-centric.