This is one thing listingviews is designed to solve.
While it can't improve the ui for picking a metadata column it does let you rename that on the display.
It doesnt give you a tabular view out of the box but that is easily done with a little diazo or could be built in later.
I've never really liked tabular view on collections. Why is it just on collections and not folder listings? Why does it have to configured seperstly for every collection? Why doesn't it work in portlets?
Something like c.listingviews should replace tabular view I think. Its way more flexible. Its very similar to the drupal concept of views.