Related to the request for improved filtering UI options for category columns (in DM-xxxxx), another nice behavior for category columns in Firefly would be for them to be treated specially in X-Y plots.

One very valuable behavior of this kind would be to permit the use of any category column, whether numeric-valued or string-valued, to define the colormap of the points in a Plotly scatterplot.

For string valued columns, the desired behavior would be to assign a color to each value, perhaps for up to a maximum of some N distinct values, with the colors chosen to be be optimally distinguishable.

For numeric valued columns, some additional design work is necessary. In some cases basing the color just on the actual numeric value may be fine or even preferred (imagine a field with values 1, 2, 3, and 4), but in other cases it may be more useful to treat the numeric values as if they were strings, assigning arbitrary but readily distinguishable colors (imagine a field with values 1, 2, 3, 4, and an error flag of 9999, where a direct numerical mapping would probably make the non-error values virtually indistinguishable as colors).

Priority is "major" in terms of long-term importance to the UX; but this is in the "important but not urgent" category.