I agree on long/skinny vs short/wide, personally. When I see SR I'll run this
all past him. My guess is that they're already used to huge spreadsheets and
that's part of it.
I'm pretty sure (although I can't find him at the moment) that Sridhar requested
the transpose saying that it would be more intuitive to a biologist. I'll
double check with him.
I think a vertical arangement would be easier to understand for the experiment
pages. Then the phenodata data frame is displayed as a data frame, not
horizontally.