Tool Shelf Panel Replacement Docker

I've really enjoyed most of the 2.8 changes so far, but there is one big problem for me and that was the removal of the tool shelf panel. I understand why it was done, but I don't think the current solution is anywhere close to optimal.

Let me start by saying I don't think we should get rid of the new toolbar, that is a good addition for new users and those who are lazy about learning their shortcuts. But it isn't a proper substitute for the tool shelf panel.

The properties panel is going to have to take up a lot of the slack now and it will quickly get overrun and become a nightmare to use once you have to start scrolling up and down through it to find everything. The new row of drop down menus at the top may contain most things from the old tool shelf panel and then some, but they make accessing things far more slow and cumbersome than is tolerable to many of us veterans.

My suggestion is to have an empty docker panel that replaces the old tool shelf panel. Put it back on the T shortcut and move the toolbar visibility toggle to something like shift+T, since it's the sort of thing that will rarely be used. People will generally want the new toolbar on all the time or off, and very rarely swap, so having it on a single key keybind is a waste.

The new docker panel should be customizable per workspace. We should be able to put anything we want on there. It would be nice to be able to create collapsible and nameable containers on there for better organization that we could either drag and drop things into or perhaps have an option in the context menu when you left click on value fields anywhere else in the UI that offers to add that field to the docker.

This way things we need to see all the time or change often will no longer require the extra steps of activating a drop down and navigating through those menus to find. Though of course the new drop downs should remain, they serve an important purpose for newcomers and for discoverability and to continue housing the less used features we don't need cluttering up the customized docker.

A practical use case is the new, and long awaited, absolute snapping feature. To be truly useful for laying out a large complex scene with speed and precision, you will need to stay aware of your current grid and snapping settings and change them frequently to fit your current task. Right now we have the snapping options in one drop down and the grid options in another, neither are visible at a glance. In order to know if we have absolute on we have to click on the snapping drop down to check and to find out the current grid settings we have to click on the overlay drop down.

Having a way to dock those settings to a custom panel that we can either leave visible all the time or access as needed with a single key press with T, is a huge boon to productivity. Being able to customize a docker like that for every workspace would make it even more useful. No matter what the task, we could then craft panels to the needs of our workflow to speed things up.

It should also make things a fair bit easier for add-on devs looking to migrate their old work to 2.8, as many of them relied on placing their settings into a panel that no longer exists. Some work may need to go into allowing users to decide which workspace panels to send each individual add-ons settings to, but it beats the current situation where they will have to come up with a whole new interface paradigm for their add-ons as part of the migration.

In addition, I'd say if the panel is open, then the free floating tool settings window that now shows up roughly in the bottom left corner, could be automatically docked to the bottom of the new docker panel, like it was in the old tool shelf panel days. Just to save on screen real estate. But if the panel is hidden, then it can still show up as an overlay window as it does now.