XML hacks and abusing the quick-access bar might work for now, but it’s clearly not the way to go.
I feel that we want and need complete customizability, with minimal wasted space and clutter. This means that we should not tolerate empty bars featuring two allcaps tabs wasting vertical space, nor thick stacks of icons that should really just be dropdowns.
The old SystemMenu UI and the new RibbonBar UI are both not even close to what the (admittedly really old and messy, but please bear with me) Legacy UI has to offer in terms of customizability and space efficiency:
Simply adding dividers and groups to the Quick Access bar is one thing, but the old UI also had support for custom hotkeys, the ability to edit the default menubar and its contents, icons, text, placement, custom dropdown menus, basically everything you’d expect from a studio or editor (according to the standard set by office 2003).
Do note that those dropdowns, groups and dividers can also be stacked and layered to heart’s content. The possibilities are endless (for example: a menubar terrain dropdown featuring the terrain tools and yet another dropdown featuring terrain plugins, which are then grouped and divided properly). Just imagine this functionality applied to context menus: right-click that imagelabel to use your favorite class switcher plugin. Maybe try imagining this being applied to the insert class dialog; divide it into dropdowns of different base classes, such as the bodymover class, guibase class, etc, then have those lead to neatly ordered submenus to select the desired class.
Rebuilding this UI and then porting the Ribbon to it would work a lot better than the other way around (which is what we’re doing now; attempting to build something that was more customizable inside of the RibbonUI).
Also first post hello everyone whoo it’s great dreams sometimes do come true~