Thanks for your honest and thoughtful feedback. A lot of what you describe comes down to personal taste I think, and as you have noticed, we indeed have no big plans to change the layout and UI in general. The exception is that we do plan to improve the layout on small screens like on the iPhone and also allow for titles to span for more than one line.
Personally we believe that it’s better that there are different tools out there that attract to different tastes and ways of working than that all of us developers try to converge our UI’s to very similar apps. Ultimately you should look for the one that works best for you. Again, I do appreciate you took the time to tell us your thoughts.