Gradient Tool active means the Appearance Panel gets truncated....

I'm going to have to disagree It is NOT expected behavior. But the ESC key works..

It seems, at a glance, once the ESC key is tapped, it never happens again for any existing objects. It will happen again, on newly drawn obects, if a swatch is dragged to the gradient panel - and it will remain until ESC is tapped. Then it stops happening for all existing gradient filled objects. 

Scratch all that.. i

It's utterly inconsistent. Happens, doesn't happen.. never know which it'll be. ESC does show the entire appearance when it happens, but clicking around, you never know if the Appearance Panel will show a single color stop, or the object's entire appearance.

I drew 3 gradient filled shapes.. I can click between them, deslect all, switch tools, then click between them again using Command for Selection but keeping the Gradient Tool active in the Toolbar.. one may show the color stop and the other two show the entire appearance. It's compeltely unpredictable - and due to that, I can't imagine why Adobe feels it's "expected" and usable by users. If it's meant to be a useful "feature" it, at the very least, needs to be predictable. I can always accept that new feaures may not be something useful to me. But they shoudln't be getting in the way of standard workflows. I see no logic, usability, or benefit to this random truncated "color stop" Appearance Panel.

(see gif) Detailed explation for the gif..

- I drew a cricle

- filled it with the default black/white gradient

- dragged a (random) purple color to the replace the black color stop in the Gradient Panel.

- Then drew the rectangle (purple gradient Appearance carried over).

- Both these objects showed only the color stop in the Appearance panel when clicking between them.

- Tapped ESC.

- Both objects then showed the entire appearance when selected and the Gradient Tool was active (This is expected behavior).

Then..

- I drew another rectangle

- cleared appearance.

- Filled it with the default black to white gradient again

- dragged a (random) brown swatch to replace the black color stop in the Gradient Panel

- Initially it too showed only the color stop in the Appearance panel.

- Switched to the Selection tool

- moved that type a bit

- Free Transform Tool and randomly scaled the type

- Switch back to Gradient Tool

- Depressing Command to temporarily initiate the Selection tool and started clicking the shapes again...

- .... you can see the GIF..... It makes no sense.

Sorry, you don't have to explain. But I just don't understand what's "expected" about it and how this is useful overall.  But okay. Y'all perhaps felt the ESC key was feeling lonely and unused?? 😀

I wish I had more versions to installed to test, but I only have CS6 (where the Appearance Panel is dependable and doesn't change based on selected tools), 29.1 and 29.4 (which both show this same odd tool-dependent Appearance Panel behavior).