> I actually asked an SS developer a few weeks ago about this, and told him it was the main thing turning me away from ModelAdmin -- that there was no list view, and he basically laughed and told me, "ModelAdmin is for huge datasets. It's for searching, not listing."

Sorry thats the only response you've got. The ModelAdmin result display is basically tied to any improvements we do on TableListField, which is a big job. Have you tried DataObjectManager as an alternative implementation in this case?

We've got a long standing ticket to show search results by default (http://open.silverstripe.com/ticket/3119), I think it would be an awesome improvement. Its a bit of a usability problem though with the existing tab/dropdown interface, I've raised some points on the ticket.