[matke]

one more question has the backdoor to using Artwork Beef to select artwork from the sideplane menu been removed or did I set something up wrong?

If I understand you correctly, you are missing the artfork beef from the context menu? That should depend from addon not skin. I certainly didn't throw anything out from context menu and artwork beef integration was introduced with this update so nothing could be removed. You certainly have an option in the skin settings to replace the standard choose art with artwork beef if you want.