I’m thankful the Mate default is a single panel as chasing things around my 4K dual monitor setup has given me borderline carpal tunnel. Although “cloned” top and bottom panels could reduce some of this, I might miss the loss of top and bottom pixels when sizing and positioning windows more.
I try to stay with default settings as “customization” can be a time sink. Since I am old, I’ve hated the “pastel” color schemes since XP first came out and most all my customization is simply larger fonts and higher contrast color schemes. The “dark” themes have been a god send and I wish they could automatically be applied to all apps. Example, I have Yaru dark (with a few tweaks) and Chrome Dark theme, but this site is white background in its tab, fortunately the text is black enough to still be easily readable, not true for a lot of sites.
I noticed my default install of 24.04 for a media player PC on our large screen living room TV has an accessibility menu/widget, a quick trial of the contrast option looked interesting, but I haven’t had time to see its impact on photo viewing or video playback.
Edit: I may be foggy on what is meant by “dual” panels. Top and bottom is the default for Mate, and the default for multiple monitors is no panels on the secondary monitors. If they can be enabled I don’t know how. If I can make duplicate top and bottom panels on each monitor so I can raise windows or launch menu selections without so much mousing around it would be worth a try.