This is good, but I don't think it quite goes far enough.
:-)
We've been talking about profiles or modes that can shift more of the UI. Toolbars, menus, docked palettes, etc.
Oh, sure! I've been pushing the concept of "workspaces" for both Gimp (where it was immediately marked as "low priority" :o ) and Krita of KOffice. In the case of KOffice, they've noted that their current UI tools are insufficient for dynamic workspaces, so it will need a lot of work.
I've found it slightly less urgent until now for Inkscape though, because despite the variety of tasks possible with Inkscape, they don't diverge Quite as much as say... photo manipulation vs painting in Gimp (in particular, as soon as the painting folks want more painting features, the photo folks start complaining that it would add too much to the UI, which led the developers to say once and for all that Gimp is a Photo program, go figure).
However, if technical drawing capabilities are added to Inkscape, then it changes the situation somewhat and would require more specialized settings. Autocad (which has yet more functions, but whatever) isn't a completely separate program from Adobe Illustrator for nothing (say, text command palette for Inkscape...).
Anyway, I've always been pretty fond of "divide and conquer" approaches. A full workspace approach would be: - toolbar management (my current proposal) - saving of preset settings (both document -snap, guides etc- Inkscape tool settings) - menu editing (in my opinion, more important for complex raster programs than for Inkscape) - and enabling/disabling of specific features (animation capabilities only activated in an "animation" mode, collaborative features only activated in an "online collaboration" mode)
These can all be implemented separately, then grouped with a single Workspace command (menu drop-down: choose workspace. A workspace would basically be loading: a toolbar setting + a menu setting + tool and document settings + etc.)
I started with toolbar management because I find it the most immediately useful and urgent: to make all those new LPEs into proper tools. Tool access is where 80% of workflow goes. Sure, it's really pesky when I have to remember to turn on or off the "scale stroke width" when doing charts or doing something else, but it's something that I only need to do once per document so at least I can live with it.
Accessing those LPEs that could be implemented as tools though? A whole other story. ;)
Oh by the way, if said toolbox management proposal gets added, could the two following be added? - color correction toolbox (brightness/contrast and other such niceties, so you don't have to save as png and export to Gimp all the time) - some raster tools (I'm not asking for a raster program in Inkscape. But I like making mock-ups in Inkscape a lot more than in Gimp because of the easy select and moving around. But I could really use that crop tool without opening Gimp's gazillion panels each time D: )