I like the word ‘realistic’ a bit better than ‘negative’. I run and manage the Natron Discord server. I’ve been using Natron for years since back when its development was still funded by Inria and have seen what currently seems like it’s slow demise. I’ve seen plenty of people who want to help maintain and develop Natron. I’ve seen lots of those people suggest (seemingly) crazy ideas like making Natron CUDA accelerated and make it sound like they could do it in one night with a single tin of red bull, and the very next day they disappear. Few ideas such as QT5 were actually realized because of the contribution from community developers. I along with the rest of the still standing members of the community can tell you the probable outcomes of this based on what we have seen over the years.
You may but I won’t abide. I prefer to be as elaborate with my words as possible.
In all honesty, this is one of the better designs that I have seen over the years. I’ve seen a lot of people trying to turn Natron into some frankenstein version of Ae, but this is not that. However based on just one image and no breakdowns/explanations of why you chose to make things the way they are, I can’t get behind it. A mockup is just the tiny part of the tip of the iceberg. Every single UI element in Natron has a purpose and there is very specific operational philosophy behind each of those elements. How you would adapt that philosophy into your UI redesign, or completely abandon it in favor of a new (hopefully better) one still remains to be seen. It’s not just shapes, colors and icons. Icons can be updated without a UI change. Colors can be updated in the theme preferences. Many aspects of the UI can be changed using a QSS Stylesheet. But UI means a lot more than that. Design isn’t how something looks, its how something functions. There’s very little that is not left to the imagination in your design eg: what happens when I select a node?, What happens when I select a noodle?, What happens when I try to move something?, etc. Each of these tiny things is part of what makes up the whole of the Natron UI, and consequently the UX and all of those things need to be taken into consideration and be either improved upon or done in a better way for the UI (overhaul) to be considered worth the effort. Without, it simply isnt.
Those things aside, who’s going to realize this design if all elements of it were complete? Current efforts in development and maintenance are dedicated towards keeping the project alive and fixing as many bugs as possible. I have already explained the situation regarding new developers above. This thread has been active for more than 3 years now. That should also tell you everything you need to know about the development status. Yes, a small refresh is needed as Rodlie says above, but an overhaul like Blender, not going to happen anytime soon because we don’t have enough developers and even if we did, we’d rather they work on more important stuff like adding important missing features, fixing bugs, etc.
The current UI isnt a development/maintenance oversight. Not at all. It’s just designed to be from the beginning as functional as possible without adding unnecessary overhead to the software (almost a clone of Nuke’s). UI needs processing power to be displayed on the screen, just like everything else in Natron. The prettier you try to make it, the more overhead it adds. The current UI has the perfect balance. It’s functional, it’s usable, it’s flexible and customizable, and it doesn’t add much overhead if at all. There’s honestly nothing more anybody who’s doing any serious work should ask for from a UI.