Until the last version of subtitleeditor (0.20) you have only four choice for the column displaying : Simple, Advanced, Translation and Timing. With this new version a new step was made in customizing of subtitleeditor, you can add the number of configuration you want.
I take this version to rewriting the waveform editor.
The first most visible feature is the speed of the renderer using Cairo, it was really improved.
I introduced a new renderer using OpenGL. It's not activated by default but you can test it by replacing "cairo" by "gl" in the configuration file (~/.config/default/config). Of course only if the opengl support is enable when you build subtitleeditor (configure --enable-gl).
The second feature is the respect of your timings preferences. If the option "Respect The Timing" is activated, the waveform editor try to respect your timing preference. Like the minimum display time or the minimum gap between subtitles, tries to avoid the overlapping... The respect of the timing can be temporarily disabled while you edit the time of the selected subtitle with the Shift key.

The video player has really been improved...but don't worry it's not yet perfect. Just more robust and logical.
Two big features have been introduce :
With the first you can adjust the speed of the playback. Now I hope you don't have any excuse for not doing a good synchronization.
The second feature is more a beta feature, because it's not really stable and don't work always like I want... It works only with the functions for play subtitle (Play Selection, Play Next Subtitle...).

Now when you try to open a file with the video player or the waveform generator and if the plugins are missing you have a better error message. Of course the next step is to propose to install the missing plugins...so send me your patch :)

For a complete list of changes see the ChangeLog file included with subtitle editor distribution.