I work with a lot of structured data and repeated fields in my tables, the new and "improved" table UI makes viewing this data extremely difficult, with everything collapsed by default.
Is there a way to revert to the older row based table views? If not, is there a way to make expanded as the default behaviour?
also open to suggestions for alternate IDEs.
As suggested by @MikhailBerlyant try using the following tools:
Try Goliath - BigQuery IDE, part of Potens.io suite of BigQuery Tools. Few links to get it - Google Marketplace, Potens.io, Potens.io Knowledgebase
As of this writing you can still use "Disable Editor Tab" to use old UI of BQ. This is available until (2022-04-11) this date is subject to change based on received feedbacks. Using the old UI, it shows the repeated results in an expanded manner by default.
There is already an existing feature request for this UI issue about the collapsed results and the BigQuery Engineering team is aware of it. I suggest to "star" the issue to let the team know that this is an important request.
