Hello all,
Let's start saying this. I really appreciate the idea to tackle the UI and make it into something more coherent, but...
If there's going to be a whole team of people on the job, how possible would it be to create something like the Coreldraw UI that let's the user move tools and UI objects around, hide and show them from view and basically create the UI he would like. I felt this to be the greatest strength of Coreldraw and it was one of the reasons why my production time using Coreldraw was about 4 times faster than when using Illustrator. It enabled the noobs to have a basic UI and for me to lard my text editing widgets with all the functions I needed to do some decent Typography.
For those not familiar with Coreldraw, download a trial version and use the tools -> customisation to get the idea. It could be quite a hassle to get everything set, but once you did, it made working a breeze. What would make a real difference though would be to unlike Coreldraw that loaded the whole shebang, load and offload functionality on demand.
For Inkscape it would be a great way of organising the abundance of extensions as well if such UI widgets would be linked to loading or not loading of said extensions. Maybe by using an extension panel where you can load or unload extensions. They are really nice and all, but in general you will only use a few of those and it becomes a bit of a bloat to load them all.
Likewise if It would to my idea also open up more space to try new and unstable functions if they'd be able to be loaded and unloaded dynamically. That way Inkscape can be build as a stable core with API to hang up new functionality and even allow for radical changes of UI objects depending on what functionality is being used. Thinking of animation, web design, print etc.
Now I understand that that is all a bit far fetched at the current state of Inkscape, but creating a flexible UI might lay a base for realising such concepts.
On the concept UI as I saw it, I would state that the importance of UI objects like the node editor would call for a top location as it is now. In the design phase of objects it is my most used tool and it might actually have some of the tools that are now in the dynamic bar moved to the toolbox (smooth node editing, cusped nodes etc.) to make access quicker. With the last chosen option made prevalent.
Likewise, there are some tools grouped together now that make me switch a lot. For instance gradients and drop shadows are in the same group, whereas I often use both in succession to make a nice effect on text objects. Maybe a reconsideration as to how things are grouped is in order. They seem more chronological than functional to me.
Cheers,
Jelle