After troubleshooting this item with blackbaud support folks, it seems the only time the dropdown is available is when enough tabs are open to span the monitor screen size. On widescreen monitors, the tabs just open across the page. On an non wide screen monitor opening all of the tabs results in a nice, clean, dropdown menu where each section may be chosen to view, and sections may be removed if desired. Also, if a user is limited to viewing only a 6 or 7 areas, they would never have access to the dropdown menu.
The Dropdown is clean, and it speeds up loading of the reporting page, in my experience.