You may (I hope) be reacting too quickly to viewport performance. The devs are quite aware that performance is not where near where it should be. They’ve only done one round of optimization’s and it was minor. In developing complex software, it’s a bad idea to try to optimize before the concept is fully fleshed out. If they were to hyper-focus on optimizations at every step, 2.8 would never materialize. They would have some foo running smoothly only to realize that foo was not the way to go in the first place and that bar was the best option all along. Now all that time making foo smooth as silk is wasted. Wait until optimization’s are done before you decide you need to buy more hardware. Unless, that is, you just have an itch to buy more hardware.
The devs are also aware that the interface is getting crowded which is why they’re experimenting with making the tool settings a new editor type or tab in the settings editor. The most recent design proposals have the tool settings in the 3D View which I particularly like. It’s pretty common in cad and modeling software and guarantees that the settings you need are never too far away. Another plus is it saves on screen space. To be honest though, I rarely ever touch tool settings anyway. Most settings are available as shortcuts while the tool is active and if I do need to tweak a parameter after the fact, there’s always the F6 menu.
One of the driving philosophies in blender development is to make tools for artists not development for development’s sake. There’s an interview with Ton that Blender Guru did where he states exactly this. It’s why there are open movie projects and Blender Studios. It’s why the Spring team is trudging through the murky waters of using alpha software during production. It’s all about ironing out usability issues, finding performance and workflow bottlenecks, and squashing bugs.
