[aniforprez]

For your complaints about the taskbar, yes I too find it incredibly annoying that they compress all the application windows into a tiny thumbnail but there is a setting to expand thumbnails to include titles and separate them if there are multiple windows which is what I use. I don't currently have access to my windows machine or I'd help you out with the exact setting but it's there somewhere in the "taskbar settings"

[DidYaWipe]

Thanks very much. But it doesn't sound like that would help. First, I doubt a giant network path would fit in the title of a thumbnail.

Second, I want to give focus to the entire application at once. ALL of its windows need to be brought to the foreground at once.

[aniforprez]

Yes there are limits to how long the title will go until it starts getting truncated so it is possible it won't fit a network path. I'm not sure if the behaviour of the taskbar was always to bring every window of an app to the foreground? But yes I don't think that's a thing either.