A somewhat related issue is that if you have all your panes pinned, it seems as though opening something (whether via link, file manager, or quick switcher) should open a new pane adjacent to the current or most recently active pane, rather than one at the far end of the workspace. I use the sliding panes plugin and often have 8 or 10 panes open, and I prefer to keep them pinned, but when I open something and forget to split first or ctrl-click/ctrl-enter, it ends up very far away and trying to reorganize the splits is a serious pain (pane?).
It seems to me that the root causes of this are likely that 1) getUnpinnedLeaf() should fall back to splitActiveLeaf() rather than creating a new top-level split, at least in the case where the active leaf (or most-recently used leaf) is top-level. (And even then, it should probably create the new top-level split as close as possible to the active/recent leaf.) And 2) splitActiveLeaf() should probably always set the newly created leaf to active.
I think that this would largely preserve the current behavior of Obsidian in most use cases. The only thing that might behave differently is if you are opening multiple links in edit mode using the keyboard with ctrl-alt-enter to open them in new panes. That is the only case I can see where making the new pane active would have an effect on needed user behavior, since to use the keyboard on multiple links you’d need to keep switching back to the previous pane.
