Is your suggestion for improvement related to a problem? Please describe.
Because my boss and collaborators are used to Word and it's change-tracking features, I am also stuck with it. Nevertheless, I use JabRef for my citations (in an ODT document that is then converted to DOCX before sending it around). It works fairly well, but there is the problem that it does not suppport every use-case I need for citations:

1. "this is so (Doe, 2003)" --> ✓ SUPPORTED
2. "this is so as seen in Doe (2003)" --> ✓ SUPPORTED
3. "this is done with the method of Doe (2004, p. 34) -> ✓ SUPPORTED with the button "Cite special", entering the additional information in the text field
4. "this is so (for a review see Doe, 2004) -> ✗ NOT SUPPORTED

My workaround is to create a custom Style file that does not have parentheses, so it contains "BracketBefore = """ and "BracketAfter = """. Then I can cover cases 1 and 4, which I use most freqently, but at the expense that cases 3 and 4 are not supported anymore.

I can write the desired format by hand and use "Insert empty citation", but I get into trouble if I have two citations which have the same author-year combination. Because if my text has already citations to (Doe, 2009) and I add another citation with that author-year combinations, all previous citations get (Doe, 2009a) and the new one is (Doe, 2009b). But not for the citations that were inserted with the "Insert empty citation" function!

Describe the solution you'd like
Please make it possible to just cite the author and year separately with JabRef. This would make everything much easier as the author and year names can be embedded in text at wish. At the same time, ambiguities of citations can still be prevented (though I'm not sure that this is implemented in JabRef)

I'm also not the only one with this problem