Revised idea: expand containers to show their contents in the catalog's contents pane. This provides a quicker navigation and browsing experience more similar to ArcCatalog and the catalog pane. It would also allow for easier previewing of items by virtue of the fact that the preview portion of the view can be resized over the contents area without having to constantly resize it just to reselect something different--something especially beneficial on small screens--even better would be a reversion to ArcCatalog's treatment of these preview panes as separate tabs in addition and not alongside the larger contents view, as they frequently slow down the application by trying to generate a preview, table, or description for everything you click when this is often undesirable. I suspect this slowdown is why ArcCatalog was designed like that in the first place. An improvement over ArcCatalog, though, would be to keep Preview separated into two tabs, geography and table, as has already been accomplished. However, this reversion to a main contents tab will not be possible if contents are not made visible in the contents pane.
In practice, it's confusing for the user to have to remember that they can't access the contents when browsing given that the contents of folders do appear in visually similar places like the catalog pane, the catalog view, and ArcCatalog. And ... it's called the contents pane.
Original idea: Allow for Layouts and Locators folders to be expanded like every other folder in the Catalog Contents pane.
