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3 months of a professional UI designer could easily quadruple the usefulness of GIMP for me. The UI, in its current state (I always use this disclaimer and it never changed in like 10 years), is a horrible mess and makes GIMP unusable for most professional work. There is no trend of it getting better. They need to hire someone from the outside, accepting that kick in the butt.

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Overhauling the GIMP UI would take way longer than three months of a single UI designer. As an operation, we are talking UI/UX design, implementation, testing, and not to mention having to refactor existing code such that it can actually handle such a radical UI change.

I'd put the (very fuzzy) estimate at something like 2 years of consistent (full time) effort from a team of, say, 5 people. That puts the cost of such a change closer to a million dollars.

Yay, at least someone gets it :)

GIMP is only UI. GEGL is actually doing the job behind it. Rewriting UI would mean to restart the GIMP project from scratch. Not that it would be a bad thing.

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