My impression is that as applications have grown in complexity, there has not been a corresponding change in our approach to GUI design. I'm talking of desktop apps for doing 3D content creation (Maya, Houdini, Blender, etc).
The menubar and hierarchical menus worked elegantly in the simpler days of the Xerox Star and Apple Macintosh, but the continued reliance on them makes me chuckle at times.
The other day I decided to count the number of GUI elements visible in one such app. There were over 200. I can't prove this, but my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create confusion and anxiety in users. Or maybe users just learn to ignore the 90% of widgets they never need to use.
I find it increasingly awkward to have to move the mouse to click inside a 16x16 pixel widget on a 4K screen. Most GUI actions are not inherently graphical (click on a button, menu, icon).
One app has such a large contextual menu (with many submenus) that the menu includes its own search field, and users click to make the menu appear, then type in a few characters to locate the menu item they want, then click on the item. I can't help but shake my head and chuckle.
My own attempts at coming up with something different have resulted in a series of (short) popup menus that can be invoked via keyboard. My hope is that users will develop muscle memory to go to the selection they want quickly. For example, hitting "C,C,C" (the "c" key three times) invokes, in order, the Create, Curves, Circle menus (each menu replaces the previous one) and creates a circle in the 3D scene.
Been planning to make a video demo...