Hi All,
First thanks to Sebastian, Brynn and others for their comments, suggestions and kind words.
I will try to summarize the thought process behind the redesign.
The main thought process behind the new interface design for inkscape was to make it more organized and user-friendly than just a theme change. For example, right now the "Text and Font panel" (Ctrl+Shift+T) has three different tabs which is unnecessary in my opinion, if you look at the new text panel it covers almost all of the functionalities in all the three panels put together. There are a few functionalities in the panel which I don't understand, so I thought I can get an understanding from you guys when we actually implement it in development. As I have mentioned in my original mail, the missing functionalities can still be accommodated gracefully without sacrificing the visual appeal.
I had a conversation in the IRC channel with a inkscape user whether we should adapt the new icons and theme right away. Any product development change takes time and is done in phases, so we can look at re-organizing the panels with the existing iconography in phase one but some controls might have to be changed. We can take the same Text Panel as an example, the font chooser can be a "dropdown" instead of a "scrolling list" as the user will be able to see a consistent number of fonts whether a single panel is docked or multiple panels are docked. Right now if I have more than one panel docked, I'm not able to see more than five fonts and the scrolling becomes more painful. Another example is whenever I choose a font it doesn't reflect on the selected text item, I have to press "apply" button every time which is not very intuitive for the end-user, at least I should be able to apply when I double click on the font name in the current control, if it is dropdown it should apply the chosen font on the selected text.
These are my observations as a windows Inkscape user and just one example of the entire thought process. Having said all this I'm not sure of the limitations in terms of technology/framework. But I'm sure we can find elegant controls/solutions with GTK itself as I can already see those controls in the current design itself, but for different actions/functions. For example, instead of putting the "superscript", "subscript" in the variants tab and under an accordion we can use a similar control as the "left","right","center" alignment icons and put them under font tab, which is easier for the users to access than being hidden in another tab and under an accordion. :)
Once we are done with the re-organization of the tools and panels, we can look at switching the theme which I assume is a matter of changing the icon images or something similar.
Like Sebastian has mentioned UX is more than just a skin change and I think Inkscape can benefit from a UX overhaul.
Best
Amarneethi