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@charles - my 2p (about all it is worth). As you say your effort was based around what you would like, and of course different people will have differing opinions.
Personally I am not a fan of "extra windows" - I would quite happily let it occupy the book details pane area while I am in "view author" mode. On small screen laptops etc popup windows are a *pita* imho.
I would guess one of your reasons may have been to have sufficient width to see the books by an author. For myself, I wouldn't use that. I can hit Alt+A if I want to see books by an author, which gives me the nice "pretty" view with covers, custom columns, tags etc as well. So any valuable data about those books like whether I own them, wishlists, have read etc is all available to me.
Obviously you have a set of users who don't care about authors at all (after all they don't have it now).
Then there is another set of users who cannot be bothered with maintaining author data, but might want it easier to get to information about an author - ala the hyperlinked author name like Kovid suggests. As found on this thread the problem is that people will want more than one hyperlink, and there is also the issue of other users who have authors who have no web pages but do have information they want to store about them.
The next step up (which is probably where I sit and closest to what you have) is where people might like to have an author photo and a comments area. What people do in comments is up to them - whether they make their own minor notes about the author or paste vast swathes of text from Wikipedia. You would still probably want the ability to add links to things like Wikipedia and the author's home page etc, but presumably you could just do that in the comments so have as many links as you want.
The final step would be the full blown author metadata db - storing stuff like DOB/DOD etc in individual fields and perhaps searchable as well. That is OTT imho as it will be a minority of Calibre users who want to repeat the maintenance effort that others on the web do.
So *my* theoretical implementation would be an author pane that can replace the book details one when you hit a hotkey/right-click or whatever (I guess you could hyperlink the author name in book details to flip to it as well). I'm not fussed about seeing multiple authors at once, but that is just me - if a book has multiple authors, you could just click on the hyperlinked author name you wanted if it wasnt the first one which would be the default behaviour.
In that authors pane, it would have a photo up the top, display the author name below it, and then just fill the rest of the comments area with a text field you can edit and a save/cancel button at the bottom. Double clicking on the photo would expand into a popup window like book details but with editable comments using the same editor as edit metadata.
That's just a theory and offered as a discussion point.
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