Keep hoping, because the GIMP team "will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting."

Introducing usability and functionality improvements isn't mutually exclusive from doing those. At the very least, I'd expect some improvements to come out of the hackfest.

The last time (winter 2017) we did a hackfest outside of Libre Graphics Meeting, we introduced a bunch of improvements to layers' blending and compositing, improved color management, improved the PSD loader/exporter, improved menu structure, introduced painting on transparent layers in modes other than Normal (which is _huge_ for painters), and introduced Flatpak builds.