Hey Chuck, I do understand your point of view (though I think you might have misunderstood a few of my comments a bit). I personally wouldn't much care if ⌘O defaulted to my iTunes library. I never use it anyway. I'm just trying to outline some of the reasoning (as a completely uneducated/outsider guess) for the current behavior.
Consider the other applications on your HD. Almost all of them behave like TextMate currently does. TextEdit, Photoshop, Illustrator, Script Editor, XCode, Safari, FireFox, Automator, QuickTime Player, Preview, etc... All participate in a standard behavior throughout the OS in which the open dialog defaults to the the last directory that the application currently opened a document from. It's not that changing TM would be counter productive, it's just that it would be a violation of the normal open behavior as generally implemented throughout the OS. The behavior you are describing may indeed be useful, and yes there are obvious development solutions to all the "what if's", but in reality its just a separate command, and should exist alongside of, not as a replacement to, the standard "Open" behavior. Hence, my suggestion that you use a command as an alternative.
As for:
In its current incarnation text mate expects that you're doing thing in a somewhat standard way.
[...]
Hey now, nothing non-standard about Terminal.
I'm definitely not claiming that the terminal is non-standard. I couldn't live without it. "Standard" probably wasn't the best word. Maybe should have been "consistent". I was saying that it makes sense to assume that if you're already in your working directory in terminal and you 'mate Foo.txt' to open it, then you're just as likely to 'mate Bar.txt' to open another file and open your files in a "consistent" way from file to file. There are a lot of people that maybe don't. I for one almost always 'mate' from Terminal or open files from the project drawer so my methods are quite consistent.
I think something you wrote makes a good point of conversation:
Now I hit ⌘O and I'm still seeing the completely unrelated file system directory from that other project! How can that be useful/good?
I think it's your opinion that ⌘O should be "project aware". I can't say it'd be a bad thing per-se, but it's still my opinion that TM has built in support for grouping files into projects so ⌘O should probably be project neutral. If you are working with a project anyway, why not use the drawer? (Use ⌘⌥~ to switch focus to the drawer & Enter to open the selection).
Fortunately TM is very robust in terms of customization, and I've rarely found something I totally needed that I couldn't massage into a command or snippet. Give the previously mentioned command a shot and I think you may not find much of a disadvantage to it.
- Cliff