UI should never be a ”someone xan fix it if they like to” issue. People are incredibly opinionated when it comes to UI changes and doing individual changes without a master plan seems like a good way to waste a lot of time just to end up with a convoluted mess that is inconsistent with itself.
The way Blender tackled is was IMO exceptional: very early on the entire discussion was lead by the community with mockups and serious involvement by all sides before any dev ever had to program a line. When they realized the scope grew bigger they asked sucessfully for donations specifically aimed at the new release.
I feel Gimp could use a concentrated effort like that and I’d certainly be willing to help when it gets going
I will give $500 USD to whomever made it substantially more Photoshop-like. Would others do the same? Is there someone recognizeable and trustworthy to run this?
As an occasional user of Photoshop and GIMP, I cannot recommend merely rearranging the deck chairs, which is what it would be to make GIMP more Photoshop-like. Photoshop's usability is not good, it's just very familiar for those who are familiar with it. If you plop someone in front of Photoshop for the first time, they are unequivocally lost. Even an expert photographer or old-school film retoucher are lost. There's a huge ecosystem of Photoshop training because of this, and the approaches and styles are highly varied.
Some tools are specialized and usability is a distraction. GIMP is extremely usable. That's what matters.
In 2019, gimp made it's most recent release. Everyone loved it, but complained about usability. Maintainers, various devs, (plugin authors), the crowd all said "it's open source, we can fix it".
It's unlikely to get "fixed". Everything has quirks. But given how great it is on the whole, I suspect we'll see it continue to grow for another 20 or years, with similar complaints on usability for each release.
In this world of ever-changing everything, it's good to see some stability: gimp is still there, and it's users continue to wish it's usability was better.