Hopefully this will fix the problem.
Maybe a brainstorming with ideas to improve the outliner will ad more useful options.
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Hi may be interesting: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/gsoc-2019-outliner-weekly-reports/7642
Very good process and possibly in 2.81.
Cheers, mib
Wow. Nice to see somebody it is working to improve the usability of the outliner.
What is the reason outliner has not been synced? What is the benefit of not having it synced?
Blender is the only software I have encountered this behavior in, and it still confuses and annoys me from time to time.
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Also, selection is not synced between viewports and Outliner. These two things seem to be so basic I’m always blaming myself to do something wrong.
@ThinkingPolygons LoooooooL best answer ever!
@Indy_logic Blender is the only 3D modeler I know. I have some experience with ZBrush but non at all with Maya, Max or Modo. But this usage of collections is unintuitive to me. In Photoshop, Krita, Inkscape you can transform each layer as well as the group it belongs to. I’ve got the feeling Collections is supposed to be something different though? Maybe just an organizational feature? Something like a directory in the filesystem?
P.S. Great…now it turns out I can’t even have objects with the same name in different groups, so it’s not even like a directory. And no, it’s not like layers either, at least not in the sense drawing software uses layers.
Yes, Collections can be a weird entity to deal with. If you ignore all the things they are “Supposed” to be and just think of them as being like the old Blender Layers previous to 2.8, they make a lot more sense. You were never able to move layers before, Right? 
You even hit the ‘M’ key to “move” objects to new collections (layers).
I think Katana was the first place I ever heard of collections. Then they showed up in Maya later. The idea is that you put things into collections and then set properties on those collections, per render layer. So, it’s a way to override settings/parameters/properties so that different render layers can render the same things differently. So, you could have a bunch of foreground elements in one collection, characters in another, background in another. Then, one layer renders just the background because you overrode the visibility of everything else, another layer has just the shadows of the characters because you overrode the matte shadow parameter on the background collection and hid everything else, another has just the foreground with the characters as a holdout etc. All this happens by overriding different properties on different collections per render layer. The render layer stores the overrides per collection. So, that’s (in very basic terms) how it works in other software.
But, this is actually the same general concept as how it worked before 2.8 too. But back then, we called collections, “Layers” but we also had “Render layers” so I think they wanted to separate the concepts. So, if you think of them like that, collections are just groups of things get included or excluded from the render layers and then have render properties set for them.
At one point there was a plan in place to actually finish out the whole concept of collections so that they made more sense. However, that’s fallen by the wayside and now people are just using them like they used layers before 2.8. Maybe you’ve heard of the “Overrides” project? Originally it included “Dynamic overrides”. but 0 progress has been made on them so I imagine they just gave up.
Collections are not 2.7x layers, they’re 2.7x groups. Instead, the new View Layers are 2.7x layers. (what I mean by that is they’re the closest thing to the old layers - they’re different as you very well pointed out)
So collections are mostly a visibility and rendering organisational feature, transform hierarchy being a different thing altogether. Maya mixes the two in a way that’s a bit quirky : transform nodes also inherit visibility, which seems straightforward BUT as soon as an object is part of a display layer (which is something you’ll want to do to cleanup a rig asset for animation for example) you lose that directness : said transform node’s visibility gets overriden by the settings of the layer it’s part of. I guess there could be such a system in Blender, where objects not part of a collection (ie part of the scene collection) also inherit visibility from their parent, bypassing the collection system. Poking @William but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe Dalai can take a look at it if it sounds like a good idea ?
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you there. View layers are literally the same as render layers from before 2.8. And yes, collections are just layers from before 2.8 as well. As I pointed out you have all the same keyboard shortcuts and controls to work with collections (the ‘M’ key being the most obvious) as you did with the layer buttons. There’s even a new addon that shows them as little block buttons in the header like before. People have even resorted to numbering them like they were before because it helps to relate to them better.
Collections were, and have always been, a replacement/upgrade to layers. Just to be clear here, when I say layers, I mean the 20 little buttons that were located in the header of the windows before 2.8. The main difference is that now you can name them, see them in the outliner and drag and drop objects from one to another. You can also now make instances of them by using them with dupli-objects or in with particals. So, their functionality has been extended some what. Or maybe I should say, their fictionality has kind of been merged with groups… Sort of
Groups on the other hand from the pre-2.8 days oddly still exist. You can see them in the bones panel and other places I can’t think of off the top of my head. The only reason I mention this is because you mentioned them being the closest thing to collections but in actuality, they’re still in place where they’ve always been. The funny thing is that I remember the original idea was to replace all groups and layers with collections but as you can see, there’s no “Bone collections” so I’m not quite sure this has even been thought of since the first design tasks came out. 
and just to reiterate, View Layers are just the new version of Render Layers. These are not the “Layers” from before. Although the “View” part of the name might have you believe otherwise.
From what I remember, what happened was that when they were conceived, the idea was that the concept of “Rendering” would change. Rendering could be anything from launch a game engine, creating an image, or initiating a 3D print. So the original idea was that “Rendering” wasn’t going to be strictly about making images so they couldn’t very well call them “Render Layers” if they were going to be used to print an object and other things. So the concept of View Layers was born. Meaning, what you see in the view can be use to “render” something. That never really panned out though and we are suck with this totally messed up naming scheme that adds more confusion to the whole mess. Not that Blender is a mess but there are a lot of confusing misnamed concepts floating around in Blender that should be addressed.
Anyway, if you remember from before 2.8, If you wanted to render a multi layer image, you created a render layer and in the render layer panel, you would select the layer buttons to change which layers were visible, masked, visible only to indirect, etc. This is essentially how it works now but you use the outliner instead: Create a View Layer (render layer really), with that selected, you select the state of the collections for that render… I mean view layer. 
There is a column of buttons that relate specifically to rendering. I can’t remember off the top of my head but I believe they are ‘Renderable’, ‘Mask’, and ‘Visible only to indirect’. You can turn them on and off, setting them differently for each render… I mean, view layer that’s currently selected. When you render, it will render all of the view layers, one after the other so they become available in the compositor for you to mess with.
So, there you go. It’s basically the same thing. The way I see it is that you can try and think of them as fancy groups or special hierarchy organizers but that’s only going to confuse you in the end. If you think of collections as layers then, they will conceptually make more sense.
By the way, if you need to group things together to move them all as one, just create an empty and parent everything that should move together under it. This is basically the same thing as “grouping” in Maya.
Yes. Collections are a merge of Layers and Groups.
But that merge can not be applied to all tools using both for distinct things.
Just because that require a different work for a different kind of merge.
For rigid bodies, Rigid Body World Group and RBW Constraint Group in 2.79 have become collections.
And Collisions Groups have become Collisions Collections. Although they are using 20 layers widget.
Replacing Collisions Collections layers widget by a collection name field would imply to have no problem in depsgraph with nested collections. And it does not seem to be the case.
Also, Bones are using Layers, Protective Layers and Bone Groups concepts to manage display, properties locking, selections and coloring.
That corresponds to more tasks than collections at object level.
So, devs just did the work for one level of complexity before going farther.
It is also the case for overrides.
Currently, library overrides are working for armatures but not for materials.
It is work in progress.
In initial design, there should be dynamic overrides applicable to viewport effects.
In early states of alpha, matcap could be different per collection.
Developers clearly made projects too big to be digested in several months during 2.8 codequest.
Now, they reduced their ambitions and are trying to make the software usable.
Tracker Curfew was put in place to reassure users. Target was set to 200 bugs. It is currently around 700 bugs.
Announce of an LTS is another way to reassure people who want stability.
But I doubt anything will really change if they persist with a too short release cycle of 3 Months.
I think that 2.82a proved that was not working. I would not be surprised if there was a 2.84a or 2.90a, 2.92a.
According to past experience of 2.5, we could have to wait again one and an half year, to really feel comfortable with new design.
It is true that View Layers would be more used if dynamic overrides and viewport fx stuff was handled by collections.
But nobody can deny that they are a little bit better than render layers.
Some work of early concept is still there, making them better.
You are defining them by using named collections instead of anonymous layers. You can use unlimited amount of collections.
In viewport, you can inspect them in Wireframe or Solid mode, not just Rendered mode.
You can display several of them at once by using several windows.
2.8 allows you to see render passes in viewport. So, you can see your renderpass from any angle before putting camera in place.
So, according to those plus related to viewport, their name is not totally irrelevant.
So is there an easy way of selecting all objects with children etc and love to another collection without splitting them all up in thousands in the outliner.
Also perhaps a smart shortcut to do the selektiv objects/select heiarchi command?
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Yeah devs never really payed attention to logic in blender.
If you have 3 objects with Lattice as children, you select the three objects in outliner and do right click → Select Hierarchy.
You might expect all the children to get selected and can move them to another collection by drag drop.
But nope, Lattices will stay in current collection and meshes will move to the other one.
Pretty logical in blender world 
Well. You may encounter a bug. That is not what I am experiencing with 4.3.2.
Select Hierarchy is selecting the lattices. And Drag & Drop is moving them with parents in the other collection.
being the 2.78a guy I can just do Shift+G → Parent->children or group. I dunno if there’s a collections in the panels for later blenders but I’d suspect they’d keep that featureset in some form?