* @Jason van Gumster * Okay, that is interesting. But does LibreOffice really have fewer features? I mean, you obviously need to keep sidebars and so on, and also LibreOffice keeps much stuff; but only the main features may be in such a bar.

At least, I have heart, Blender is kinda hard for new users, so possibly such a bar can make it a little easier to use…

* @rugk * I think blender could do much better with tool and option discoverability but I think ribbon menu is a good solution for different kind of program.

The way blender works and is used is that 90% of the time you have more than one editor open. Plus couple more if you count the outliner and settings menu with modifiers and object settings etc. This already creates a first problem for ribbon menu. Do you have one or several ribbon bars? Is your ribbon menu context sensitive or does it simply show all tools for all editors? Either way you have a menu that takes a lot of space or needs a lot of scrolling to browser. There is also a difficulty with tools that are not context sensitive. When you initiate such tool or operation you need to add more steps to current blender workflow to make it work in practice as you need some way to choose the correct editor viewport to use that tool or operation.

Blender 2.5 was not ribbon based. All it did differently was that the object settings menu was laterally at the bottom of the screen instead of on the bottom right corner. And it had lots of tool options there. It may look the same but is not. It did not even have tabs.

The strength of ribbon based ui is that it allows you to work efficiently in single viewport program like excel or word. As the program is very specific what it does and it only really uses just one viewport the ribbon based ui works better in that more focused gui. You can turn things on and off and there is never confusion where the effect is. You only have one selection in one place viewable in one single way. Very different in blender when you can have lots of viewports open when you do animation or rigging for example.

I think blender needs better tool discoverability and it can be some kind of menu that contains tools in easy to find way. Ribbons (work phase specific tabs) can be part of that but not really as a big menu on top of blender but maybe something like a re-organized T menu. I'm not fan how they did the T menu in 2.8 and a ribbon based system there could work really well.

If it was up to me I'd add a search bar to every menu like ue4 has and make it hierarchical search so you can look for specific tools and at the same time you also discover all the other tools that do similar things. So when you look for the rip tool you also find the split, collapse and merge tools under group called join&separate. Now all those are splattered in random drop down lists and there is no way to discover anything unless you watch a youtube video. Also blender desperately needs more right click context sensitive menus.

* @rugk * I think the idea that any high-end 3d software needs to make it "easy" for new users is a bit of a farce. Making things in 3D is not easy. Period. It has certainly gotten easier over the past decade, but we're not there yet. The UI and UX should definitely be intuitive and approachable, which is what 2.8 has already done. Learning blender (specifically 2.8) is no more difficult than learning Maya, Max, Modo, or Cinema 4D and it will only get easier as more 2.8 beginner tutorial content is created.