Personally i don't care about taxonomy. But a lot of my users do. They want something like a taxa stacked plot as their initial look. For them, being able to click to select a taxa of interes and scroll through their samples seems to be popular. I believe that stacked bars at 1 level are useless

My original response should have said "can't just plot phyla"

Hmm, that's fair. I think my issue is that circular esque charts aren't the best choice for data visualization. I personally much rather do stacked bar charts to get a better idea of the distribution at the phyla level or even explore my family of interest at the genus/level. 1/