it appears that it may address the qubes “split key” issue. additionally, it appears to allow for storage of keys on external encrypted drives. i haven’t tried either of those.
for me, i simply didn’t want all of my keys stored in thunderbird’s config file. while it may be convenient for people who only use gpg for sending and receiving e-mail, i still use it to encrypt and sign files that i place on servers. thus, being able to use it from the command line interface is desirable for me there. i did test this out and it works fine.
the public key management is still rather cumbersome. i don’t yet understand why thunderbird allows for the use of an external gnupg instance, but doesn’t have a similar setting to store all of the keys outside of thunderbird. so, for the moment, public keys added to the keyring in thunderbird will need to be manually exported if one wants to work with them from the command line.