@TechFan, the main planned changes in firmware 2.1.0 are:
1. Each station can have a different water time within a program
2. Weather-based adjustment of water time (see my description here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=891)
3. Each station can be individually enabled / disabled (disabled stations will not run and will not show up on the UI)
There will be other minor changes too but the above three are the main one.
In your case, 1 will definitely help keeping the number of programs down. You mentioned running two sets of stations in parallel, while the stations within each set run sequentially. That will not be supported until we introduce the concept of ‘serial groups’. It’s briefly explain here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=401&p=2659&hilit=attribute#p2659
basically each station can be assigned to a serial group; stations that belong to the same serial group will be serialized, while stations in different groups are allowed to run in parallel. This will allow you to run two sets of sequential stations in parallel. Because this involves quite a lot of changes, we are not planning to implement this for 2.1.0 yet.