Hi Mary
Yes, and this is indeed a major improvement (I moved the floating help widget I have for our help-desk from the right to the left for the reason of making sure this is visible. I would add that if the interface defaulted to the hidden view when unoconv was not configured and a pdf submission was not detected I would have less problems with the system.
I also have to say that the interface design or even the sudden change in system requirements was not ultimately the reason I have avoided 3.1 this year - although knowing I will avoid the support issues I am sure I would have is certainly appealing. The straw that broke the camels back is I can no longer delete (as admin) submissions that students have made - when I try it refuses to save the empty submission saying there is an existing submission etc. I would think that this may be an instalation issue but after installing on three different distributions - at least twice on each (Debian 8.5, Ubuntu 16.04 and Centos 7) and having the same problems (as did a colleague who also tested) indicates that it is not something as simple as a straightforward installation issue. As soon as I tested the same thing on 3.0.5, the problem went away. I also had problems submitted on behalf of a student too with errors on "some" files.
I will give 3.1 (or 3,2 or whatever) a go again next year when hopefully there has been more testing and likely some finetuning.