I think whoever created all this active tools in 2.8 went too far and overdid them. In my opinion doing something like rip edge, smooth vertices, edge slide etc will never be used using tool bar. It’s just not practial, you don’t repeat these tools 10 times in a row. And extrude, inset and bevel active tools won’t work because they will take away move/rotate/scale tools from people who even use gizmos. How would people use it? Let’s take this simple shape for example :
- switch to inset tool > inset
- switch to extrude tool > extrude twice
- switch to scale tool > scale
- switch to extrude tool back > extrude
- switch to inset > inset
- switch to extrude > extrude
- switch to scale > scale
And there is 3+1 type of extrudes
Extrude tool
And all the time you would need to drag your mouse from tool shelf to object to scale and extrude. Or use hotkeys anyway.
The way other softwares work around extrude/inset and move, scale at the same time by allowing users to use hold shift(or ctrl) for example to drag gizmo axis and tweak your settings afterwords but i think this is not gonna work for blender, “adjust last operation” works only for the last operation in blender. They won’t be able to move/scale and tweak anything after, like in maya for example. And maya doesn’t have inset as far as i know, extrude and inset in maya merged into 1 tool.
And imho i don’t even know why we have extrude (and even 3 types of them) when inset already can do all of this and more. Probably for speed, pressing hotkeys faster than clicking checkboxes.
Don’t beat me, i’m blender user and never used maya. Just trying to explain why these active tools probably not gonna work. At least for experienced users (maybe only for people who prefer to use G/S/R and for some reason don’t want to press E, but that will be strange), but if their purpose was to be for kids or people who never used 3d modeling before and need some visual representation of what they’re doing then it could be useful but probably will confuse everyone else, and they will think “these blender devs are crazy, how do we supposed to use it?”.
Imho blender needed more tool oriented menus (preferably pie menus) with the most used tool on top for quick access. Doing active tools for every operator is not the best idea since you’re losing ability to move/rot/scale with gizmos(but that’s just my opinion).