1) Information dense
2) Looks good in screenshots
3) Information dense and easy to use
4) Information dense and easy to use and looks good in screenshots
An awful lot of designers stop at 2 because a 4 is way harder to achieve, yet a 2's pretty easy to sell (to "stakeholders"). The result is at least sometimes (sometimes) better than a 1. They may also drop a 3 to a 2, though, and it's really hard to later turn a 2 into a 3 (since it's "uglier", so harder to sell) and a 2 is so different in character from a 4 that it can't even really be considered progress toward it (a 3 might be).
For progress in polishing stuff (not only visual), see the blog https://pointieststick.com/ for weekly updates.
I kind of feel bad about my first comment because I know it takes a lot of time to do these modifications, the new interface is a clear improvement from what was there before and UX wise it's not bad at all.
It's just that every time I use KDE, I have this feeling that great work doesn't shine as it should because of padding, alignment and box in a box in a box issues. I know these adjustments are a pain to make and that it's a very ungrateful work but it shows.
So, thank you to the design team I guess and keep up the good work.
I have to apologize in advance because it's going to sound like a harsh comment and I know this is volunteer work. I really think that KDE is technically very good. The amount of basic design mistakes however is just unbearable as far as I am concerned.
I mean, let's take a look at this improved notification panel. The closing and setting icons seem slightly lower than the icon on the left of the title. The large hamburger menu icon is actually two pixels on the left of the closing icon. There are 17 pixels of top padding but only 12 pixels of left padding. The large image is one pixel of center (232 pixels on the left, 230 on the right). Every single line of text has a different interline.
And it's same for every application of KDE. They really need a design team to polish it up.