@joepie91 @rysiek @inkscape It's not entirely disingenuous, I think. Abruptly changing the whole interface of a tool for the sake of making it more familiar to users of another tool torpedoes the muscle memories of people who learned the old interface. It's like changing Vim from a modal editor to a modeless one because it's not accessible for beginners. Everybody who has built up years of muscle memory using Vim as a modal editor would be pissed.
Not at all saying tools like GIMP aren't absolutely atrocious from a UI/UX perspective, but changing them to be nicer will almost always make it worse for people who have gotten used to the interface sucking, unless you also allow users to revert to the old one.