YIKES. 
Good info, thanks. Geeze, that seems horribly confusing.
You can use UVmaps for textures tweaking particles and modifiers. Those textures may not be used by materials.
So, that may be useful to be able to display in viewport an UVmap that is not the one used in Render.
THERE IT IS.
Man, I would have never found THAT. Thanks Richard.
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Yeah this minimalist approach in my opinion does not work. Once you get used to what that little dot means, yes. At least they are fairly consistent. That little dot means, "click here because there is going to be a list of things for this input area.
Any kind of label that means “something goes here” and a drop down arrow would be the way to do it, IMHO.
Agreed: the traditional way would be to have a “twirl-down” arrow there.
My assumption is that a “dot” meant something could be animated. --Was that ever focus-grouped? 
Yes. But I hear only a bunch of pin heads showed up 
I note that the UV Editor received a bit of love, covered in this Recap, and coming in 2.90
They even made that overly subtle icon Richard mentions above more conspicuous (and in line w/the nodal color conventions).
Many nice UI enhancements coming soon. – See, I’m not always grumpy.
I too have had much confusion about “Slots” and materials and textures, and actual image files. I get confused if I’m working with an image file called image.jpg, or a “texture” called image.jpg. I have ended up with purple colored objects and can’t figure out how to assign images to materials in slots.
In Lightwave, an object, or a selection of polygons (faces) are assigned a surface, no confusion.
Yes, the face-by-face assignment of Surfaces is what I’m used to. Here are my LW-based impressions and workarounds, there may be errors herein:
FWIW, the best approach I’ve come up with is to conceptually treat Blender ‘slots’ as LW ‘parts’, and know that in Blender only slots are assigned Materials.
(Slots are like Parts in that a face/poly can only be assigned to ONE.)
Another helpful thing to remember is “SLOTS HAVE NO NAME”. This is confusing because they sorta seem to have a name, but that’s just the material they are referencing. Slots only have a position in a list, ie “Slot 1”, “Slot 2”, etc.
And finally (?), you must assign a face to a slot to affect its material.
It all seems stupid and convoluted to me – it seems to make more work than necessary. I didn’t have any trouble getting used to C4D’s approach to Materials, so it’s not just unfamiliarity. I suspect the slot system is legacy code from the earliest days of CGI. It’s awkward.
I agree, it’s very confusing.
I found an old video on YouTube explaining it all, which helped a lot. It shows a flow chart of how data blocks work. This flow chart used to be a part of Blender, but they eliminated it in favor of a different type of chart view. I don’t know why, it’s not as clear as the flow chart.
I’ve been hoping there’d be a flowchart somewhere…
Even this guy struggles with the concepts. 
Somehow they convinced themselves that they were doing it the right way, but other apps magically manage to be a lot less confusing.
Right out of the gate they choose BAD TERMINOLOGY: by calling “Objects” ‘objects’, rather than TRANSFORMS, which is what they are mostly, they blurred the line between Transforms and Meshes. Maybe it makes more sense in Dutch, but as usual the b dev’s wrong headedness in UI issues pops up every effing where.
Good thing it’s free.