Rumors of a new Blender UI have been going on for far longer that. I remember watching this video about 3 years or so ago, which itself was forwarded almost 6 years ago.
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I was very pleased to see this video again, thank you.
Today that we can compare these so smart and reasonable proposals with the mess that 2.80 has become, my humble opinion is that at that time Mr. Ton made a big mistake in so presumptuously snubbing Mr Priceâs suggestions.
I still donât get why a Microsoft Office UI (with its paradigm of giant icons and hiding some tools behind multiple layers of windows and menus) is the best possible route for a DCC app?
The UI is still a topic for the devs. after 2.80âs release, thereâs a branch for instance where the filebrowser is being redesigned and moved to a floating window. Thereâs also an addon for those who think floating windows are so awesome they will smother the screen with them.
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A goodly chunk of what was proposed there made it into 2.8. The biggest difference is that they kept the properties panel, instead of going with a ribbon interface, which, if they opted for that, youâd have a lot more people here spitting fire and hot nails over the changes.
Imagine instead of having to scroll through a vertical interface thatâs still largely familiar to your average Blender user, youâd have to scroll horzontally through a bunch of large icons along a strip at the top of the screen to find your settings. That wouldnât be all that pleasant. Plus, given that widescreen monitors have considerably more horizontal space than vertical, having that ribbon there would mean itâs eating up more precious screen real estate thatâs better dedicated to the viewport.
The end result would be something that looks nice, but gets in the way, and takes a lot more clicks and scrolls to find what youâre looking for.
âŚyouâd hate it.
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in the video he mentions
âlots of scrollingâ ⌠hahahah
The funniest thing, is that in the video he proposed to use orizontall tabs for the tools, because it was more convenient and avoided using scrolling âŚ
Has no one ever noticed that blender was originally designed like this, and that the buttons were actually âtabsâ? 
yep ⌠at that time no scrolling, just no scrolling!
however nice video, it says what Iâve always thought: task focused interface, ie highly predictive and contextual property panels and tools. ⌠there is still the possibility of directing blender towards this path ⌠the new outliner started with the object sync, and the same outliner dev, has already made the proposal to put in sync the panels of properties.
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The fact we are already familiar with vertical scrolling doesnât mean we can bear even more scrolling, on 2.8 they pushed the concept too far imho.
Large icons are not a matter of having large icons by themselves, rather a totally different organization of both UI and thinking.
And from the beginning I had the opinion that they had better organize their thinking instead of try and changing the UI without a real planning as they did.
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Honestly his proposal has one big pitfall, which is that screens are more horizontal than vertical, and vertical space is a big sacrifice to avoid scrolling
Which is the reason why the side tabs panel is so stupid.
Almost a year has passed. Since the writing of the first post of this topic, nothing has changed. The same total disregard for user requests regarding changes to the interface. Laziness is a terrible thing, taking into account the opinion of those who simply assent always, to everyone, and in everything, are incredibly âusefulâ for development. This situation is terrible. As I like to write, the blender is still a New Yearâs, beautiful, flashing, useless tree. Only worse than brutal, titanium, convenient and logical 2.79.
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Which is typical, after reading most of the posts, I see the same comments about âthere are always people who want to live in the Stone Ageâ, but these people never give real arguments in favor of the âadvantagesâ that the new interface looks like as a childâs coloring .
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if to me they put a global search on the area of the property panels (which enables the search on all properties in total)
Iâm okay. 
The truth is that they have breathed a big sigh of relief when finally they managed to tidy up everything they had thrown in the UI pile and make it somehow work, Iâm talking about the Tool panel, Toolbar, Active Tool, Redo panel, info panel, Properties and so on.
How do you think they can now even figure to dismantle everything to comply with our (usersâ) demands?
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I agree with you. I had such thoughts that they started to do something, then decided âjust to do somethingâ and leave it as it is. And the type of âthere will always be dissatisfiedâ, and fanatics from the community will support anything, just to be noticed.
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I really, really liked what he had there. The Blender community were up in arms about so he had to retract the proposal but you could tell he was at least thinking of the problem in a more modern, task oriented way. 2.8 is a step in the right direction but as much time as the release took itâs still a mess. They took some of the concepts in the video but completely ignored the driving goal behind his proposal.
- So we have the toolbar on the left, but itâs actually pretty cumbersome to use, especially for sculpt mode (that would have been addressed in Priceâs proposal by a top bar âtabâ.)
- They added a top bar, but completely botched it by trying to tie it to tools as opposed to tasks like his original proposal.
- They removed the N panel, only to re-add it and make it even more stupid.
- They added a context sensitive right-click menu but its not as smart as the proposal. It basically just gives you all the options for whatever mode you are selected in a long menu.
- They added tabs but all it does is change the screens to default preconfigured views. Waste of tabs if you ask me, they should just stuck with 2.7xâs dropdown for that.
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anyone who followed the course of the development must have realized its proceeding:
âthis thing should go there, but no room⌠- well, we could put this stuff on top and get the space - but then where to put those properties? - we can gather all that and make a dropdown⌠no, maybe better a tab on the side.â
I have even been able to perceive the anxiety and apprehension behind all this.
Several good ideas in themselves, but assembled without a real scheme, without a strategy towards a fluid use of space, tools and viewports (and even of Collections).
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Yeah I agree thatâs super silly. For one XSI, Max and Maya all have different keybindings to do things. The three didnât get Maya keybindings until Autodesk bought Maya and XSI. XSI used zxcv vs qwerty like Maya. But you know what they all had in common? They didnât try to fight the users everyday experience of using a computer by implementing weird selection behavior.
The major issue people had with Blender was itâs selection behavior which seemed archaic and backwards to every other application on your computer since at least the original Mac. It wasnât just other DCC apps Blender was fighting, but your browser, your word processor, your operating system etc. Left click select and right click for a menu has been a thing for decades.
Just changing that one thing throughout the application and pretty much nothing else has made it usable to everyone.
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Furthermore, they seem to have put a great effort just to switch right to left selection, and I sincerely wonder why, since from my start on 2.5beta I have used left-button selection flawlessly, with just a few of changes in keyboard layout, and at that time I was even using a MagicMouse (that is, without a middle-button).
It only worked well in 2.5-2.7 in certain views. It worked okay in 3D view but not in the graph view for example. So saying you were able to change its 2.5 isnât really saying much since it didnât actually work all that well throughout the application. They also put in effort to do most standard selection behavior like click and empty space to deselect (in the industry standard keycap) and box select from empty space etc. So I get that they had to actually do some work to get this done properly.
âthis thing should go there, but no room⌠- well, we could put this stuff on top and get the space - but then where to put those properties? - we can gather all that and make a dropdown⌠no, maybe better a tab on the side.â
I have six in the morning (I did not sleep that night) and maybe I would take it for a dream that I see the first person who understands me and writes the same thing that I write, with the same justification and understanding.
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I actually was meaning from 2.5beta up to the 2.79.7 Iâm using today,
and I can assure it worked fine all-over the app.