The usual disclaimer... not a programmer, but perhaps some GSOC participant
would find my suggestions worthy of implementation.

Inkscape has gained some pretty impressive features lately, but complexity has
taken a toll on the UI. It now contains many icons, toolbars, and dialogs, and
these UI elements take a lot of space, even on a large monitor. he problem is
even more pronounced on an Ubuntu desktop where the GTK theme forces Inkscape to
render all toolbars using extra large icons, making it too large for many
resolutions. The dialogs are also too large, with oversized controls and a lot
of spacing, and you can barely fit a couple of them on each side when they are
docked.

Gimp had a similar problem and they solved it by introducing a "small" theme
that users can st, which makes all the icons and widgets smaller. I think
Inkscape could benefit from using such a theme.

Another great UI improvement would be to make inkscape remember the windows
settings between sessions. Currently whenever I open a new session of Inkscape I
have to resize the window and turn on a couple of dialogs - layers and fill &
stroke. Then I have to resize the dialogs themselves because the layer dialog
opens with hardly any space to show more than one layer. It would be great if
Inkscape could remember those settings between sessions.

One last thing, a very small one - I think having layer dialog icon next to the
other dialog icons on the right size of the main toolbar could be useful.