Personally, I Iike play better in the space button. I use DAWs, and video editor and Space is always play. That’s the way I like it. I don’t want a menu popping up when I hit the space bar. So my point is that your preference for the space bar being search is not necessarily everyone else’s. Considering how easy it is to change what is the point of complaining.
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#1: agree re: top-header, could be a preference (edit ~ committed). Vertical button navigation was needed since they were often clipped out of the view.
#2: quick favorites were never assigned to space, not sure what you mean.
#3: by “small menu in the bottom right” assume you mean floating panel on bottom left. You only need to expand this once.
#4: Re “On the other hand, there is no quick command to switch between tabs” there is, but it wasn’t discoverable - committed ~ Ctrl-PageUp/Down cycles. Suggest checking the Shortcut Key Changes (Summary section)
#5: agree, but prefer to leave that hornets nest alone 
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That floating panel is pretty awful. In 2.79 I could pop out the redo panel right under the mouse whenever I needed it with F6. Now it’s constantly in the way. Can we just have an option to get the thing to disappear?
And now that the view options are in those nasty popovers instead of the n-panel where they belong, there’s no way to keep them on screen. In 2.79 I liked my view options on screen for reference as to what I’m loooking at. It’s kind of driving me nuts that I can’t now. Any way users can move that stuff or duplicate it back in the n-panel?
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Adobe has been around, still has problems with theirs so I don’t think I’ll hold my breath waiting for the perfect ui.
maybe the search bar can be added by default to the favorite menus. And once you search for a command You can do like web browsers and pin it to favorites ?
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What about adding a search box to the top bar?
I can see why there is so much - not hate perhaps - but dislike for the new UI. it is very different. I’ve kept things mostly at stock 2.8, but I changed a few things to improve ‘quality of life’. I made the menu Spacebar again (2.49 wooo!) I also changed select all back to a toggle for ‘A’. There are a couple of other hot keys I’ve been meaning to change, such as recalculating normals, which is now like Alt N or something instead of Ctrl. I found that within a couple of hours of using 2.8 for a project, I’d gotten pretty use to it all. You occasionally have to go hunting for a particular setting, or button. And the pop up menu sometimes gets in the way when you’re moving verts about (They need to do something about that!) But as of right now, my use of the Beta hasn’t differed too much from 2.79. Overall, I like the UI changes. At the moment however, I’m just modelling. Things could change whilst I start diving into others things like sculpting, texturing etc…But for now, I’m pretty happy with it honestly.
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Simpler than ever and almost the best ui.
People were saying the same thing about the 2.5UI and I might have been one of them I loved that change from 2.4x this one I am a bit ambivalent about but after that much praised UI came out 2/3 years later we had the Andrew Price proposal.
complaints about UIs are pretty much universal across all programs out there because it classical bike shedding it’s the one place that the layman can speak on about with some kind of confidence
I think a lot of people are forgetting that Blender has always been very customizable and I don’t think that will change with 2.8+ moving forward. Weren’t there some aspects of 2.5x - 2.7x that you changed to fit your workflow? Didn’t some folks come out with addons or plugins that “fixed” certain things about the UI to make workflows easier or more convenient? Let’s take a breath and calm down – don’t wash the dishes and then put them in the dishwasher. This is a beta and you can be sure that the BF is listening to the users and will iron things out.
Few people are complaining about the things that are customizable. It’s mostly the things you can’t change or get rid of that are annoying. Like the topbar. Or the redo panel. Or the popovers. Or the new properties panel layout. Or the icons.
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I’ve been following this thread a bit - I haven’t tried 2.8 yet, but the comments regarding the folks that complained about the 2.4 to 2.5 transition made me recall that I never considered giving a blender a try until 2.5 came out specifically because the of the interface.
2.5 came out I think about the same time as the final death throws of trueSpace 5.
Or having the render progress bar at the bottom and so small you can hardly notice it. It took ages to realise where it was.
- You mean active tools? or what? The 3D view header?
If it’s the 3D view header, it was only made on top, so it followed the name “Header”. However, you can switch it to bottom by right clicking on it. You could switch between top and bottom headers the exact same way in previous versions as well. This default layout change is such a tiny issue, that ti’s not even worth talking about. - Space is PLAY ANIMATION, by default (Which makes total sense) and it has never been “Quick favorites”. It used to be “Tool-shelf at mouse” kinda of a thingy, which was kinda weird imho.
Quick favorites is “Q”. Learn to use Quick favorites, and you’ll find that it’s better than typing commands into search every time. The quick favorites menu in blender 2.8 is pure gold.
It’s a menu where you can easily place multiple functions or checkboxes, that you would have otherwised searched for in search… - Can it not be always open?.. no sure.
- Blender always had specialized layouts like this. Nothing changed here, except that now they are displayed as tabs, not as a drop-down menu.
Never used them tho, and with blender 2.8 i might… - I cannot relate.
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Can’t a lot of those things be “fixed” with addons though? Or updates by the developers? We’re months away from a release candidate.
Well everything can be fixed with an “update” to the source code, lol. Addons won’t help though.
And months isn’t a whole lot of time really. The way I see it, at the rate it’s going, Blender needs closer to a year in the oven before it becomes coherent again. That’s not a criticism of the devs btw - they’re going at a great pace - it’s just my perception of the enormous number of things that need further iteration.
Here’s the thing from my point of view… I came to Blender from Lightwave. That software has stayed the same, UI/workflow-wise, for many, many years now and is pretty much becoming stagnant. The LW forums are a ghost town compared to BA and there are complaints about lack of updates.
The point is, the Blender devs aren’t afraid to take chances and implement some massive changes, all without worrying about losing users, unlike the LW devs (who seem unwilling to take the software to the next level). We should be grateful for that since Blender is making great strides toward becoming an alternative to more expensive, main stream software. Complaining about this feature or that feature or “why was this changed”, etc. isn’t as productive as posting bug reports or feature requests. The devs want to make Blender the best it can be and if there is a feature that isn’t good or missing, I’m sure they will listen.
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That’s all well and good, but you have to allow some time for iteration. It’s fine to try things, but it’s not a great idea to just keep changes because now the work is done, regardless if they actually work better.
Some ideas are good and well worth keeping (the new depsgraph, Eevee, excision of the game engine and Blender Render), some need further work so as not to be a regression (active tool concept, toolbar, collections), and some are bad ideas that straight up need to be cut because they don’t work as well as the old way (topbar, popovers, miscellaneous UI changes).
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Then suggest real fixes. My own experience and opinion of what you say to cut is opposite from yours here, so not likely we will agree on a way forward unless concrete suggestions are made on which way to go from here. Top bar is flipping sweet imo, as well as most of the UI changes that are based on new things under the hood.
The topbar is awful. It puts immediately relevant information and controls completely out of view, in not one but TWO different places (which option goes where being completely arbitrary), both of which are so far from what you’re working on and each other that to see them, I have to move my head by some 30 degrees vertically and 45 horizontally to either of them. And that’s if you’re only working with one window! If you’ve popped out an editor, your tool options are now in a completely separate window that is either hidden by your editor or minimized! If you dare click an option in that other window, your editor disappears! 
It boggles my mind how anyone could express any superlative about this, except if they haven’t really used it and it reminds them of Photoshop.
Tool controls belong in the editor you’re currently working with! This has always been the case in Blender up till now, so my real fix suggestion is to put the tool options back where they always have been - with the tools.
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