The classic look suffers from the same issues. The padding is far too heavy on most of the UI elements.
If you use Eclipse on OSX or Windows with a lot of project folders loaded at once, you will see how much better it is than on Linux.
Maybe this is the issue I'm having when trying to explain the problem I'm facing. A lot of people seem to think that I'm complaining about the new Juno interface when this issue has been around much longer than Juno.