I really appreciate your feedback, improving the UX/UI of GitLab is my number one priority. We have been doing extensive research on Navigation, you can see the issue here:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/7
I would love for you to take a look and give us feedback on the two directions we are considering. When we made a significant change to our navigation by removing the sidebar, most felt that there was "too little" information being shown, so I am intrigued by your "too much" comment.
I only have some gripes in the UX/UI:
- On GitHub i find the layout / navigation pretty clear. It's a bit hard to explain this feeling, but the information is always well packaged and that makes it easier to grasp (whether we're talking about commit, issues, reviews and whatnot).
- GitLab has definitely improved (even though it's not that nice that you upgrade and everything moves) but still with their layout (probably using too much % of the screen?) i always am confused. I feel there's "too much information" on the screen and that makes it hard to understand where I am and what I am doing.
But I really really love GitLab Pipelines: we use it pretty much as it was intended (CI using Docker images on a runner, manual tasks for deployments, etc.). And it simplifies a LOT our devops.