[jdiff]

Information can be dense and designed. It's actually more important for dense information to be designed well to avoid devolving into soup. KDE and its many design inconsistencies and automatic collapsing of menus into "... and X more items" leading to menus nested 5+ deep is not good design.

Away from KDE, away from GUIs, a dense text readout of key value pairs with no new lines presents a lot of information, but is functionally useless. A tiny dash of design - pairs on new lines, some boldness for keys, indentation for values that wrap to new lines - drastically increases the readability. No matter how familiar you are with this particular text dump, this remains true. You can't escape design by running off into the terminal.

In GUIs, having movable, modular panels can be good design. Blender's design is quite good, especially among its peers, and everything about it can be shuffled around in ways most apps with modular panels can only dream of.

Again, we're not talking about a 1 dimensional spectrum between design and density. Design isn't just "add padding" and "remove customizability."

[jdiff]

I fully realize I'm just talking to myself at this point but I want to get this thought out of my head and add that a big part of Blender's good design specifically comes from its flexibility. Every workspace is built from well-designed panels that are consistent internally and with each other, and that can be moved around at will to suit particular parts of the 3D workflow. Blender's modularity and customizability is actually a vital part of what makes its design good.