After close to a year of waiting for the cover flow to return in an update of iTunes, in the mad hope that Apple would have realized the pointlessness of removing it and restored it to their software, I've thrown in the towel and reverted to iTunes 10.7. It was worth all the trouble of retooling my library and resyncing my ipod just to have it back again.
I still hope that Apple will come round and reimplement it in the next version of iTunes. The glory of Apple's music software is that it's always appealed, and been designed expressly to appeal, to people who really care about their music and its craft. To be able to scroll through and appreciate all the fantastic cover art in my collection, and have it on display as the music plays, is no small thing, and I don't understand what new vision of iTunes made that essential part of the user experience--the user experience Apple has always so emphasized--obsolete. While I'm at it, the new music interface on iOS 7 falls victim to the same sins, replacing the cover flow with some bizarre thumbnail view and shrinking the cover art on the player screen for reasons that I can't possibly imagine, and it's fortunate for me that my iPod is too old for iOS 7.
I have ceased to buy any music from iTunes for the last several months, choosing instead to purchase it from other sources. There are frankly many personal reasons for this, but Apple's apparent loss of vision in the user experience department certainly falls among them.