I've just noticed that in Firefox you can configure the upper toolbars by right-clicking and selecting "customize." Then you can drag and drop elements wherever you want and/or drop them into a box to remove them from the bar.
Will Inkscape be able to do this? As options are added to the various tools, their option bar start to become too long for computers with smaller monitors (especially small laptops), when most people won't need All the options at a time. The drop-down is an awkward workaround for many at best, and right now you can't chose the ordering either.
The Firefox solution is in my opinion a rather nice one. When Inkscape's toolbars migrate to XML (was that it?), would it have the same level of configurability? If so, how long would it take, as it'd affect whether I try to come up with some GUI designs as options to an existing tool or as a separate tool (I'm not adding them to options of an existing tool if it makes the option bar twice as long as before)?