The blender team has done amazing work on the ui. But it was not some "complete rewrite to make it more accessible" It was closer to "We have a good UI but it has a reputation for being weird and hard. so make the color scheme darker add a drop down menu and most importantly get rid of the undeserved bad reputation by telling everyone we rewrote the whole thing" That is, it was sort of exactly the same thing as this darktable drama, more marketing than actual change. However in blenders case it was for good as people then gave it a try and discovered thet blenders workflow is actually pretty good.
The specific example you gave was the workspaces. That did not sound correct to me so I checked my 2.3 reference manual(the big book they sold right after going opensource) and it has workspaces. I want to say they were one of the big things added for the 2.0 release But I don't really remember that well and am too lazy to actually try and install old releases to find out.
I don't use a lot of 3d software so I am not a huge authority but sometimes it almost is like the opposite has happened. The commercial 3d editors have been copying some of the features blender introduced. stacked windowing system, single window editing, put all the controls up front instead of hiding them behind menus, modal editing. This is a two way stream of ideas as the various editors copy each others good ideas.
Nobody said it was a complete rewrite - in their announcement they call it a redesign, which is what it needed. It's pretty common for tech industry folks to downplay the importance of UI, but these changes were far more significant than a dark theme and a dropdown.
And sorry I misspoke - I was talking about the new template feature where you go File -> New -> 2d Animation - and it puts you in the preset template for doing 2d animation.
The Workspaces are significantly better as well though - it's worth downloading blender 2.7 and the most recent version of blender and comparing, it honestly is night and day comparing the old UI to the current one.
The specific example you gave was the workspaces. That did not sound correct to me so I checked my 2.3 reference manual(the big book they sold right after going opensource) and it has workspaces. I want to say they were one of the big things added for the 2.0 release But I don't really remember that well and am too lazy to actually try and install old releases to find out.
I don't use a lot of 3d software so I am not a huge authority but sometimes it almost is like the opposite has happened. The commercial 3d editors have been copying some of the features blender introduced. stacked windowing system, single window editing, put all the controls up front instead of hiding them behind menus, modal editing. This is a two way stream of ideas as the various editors copy each others good ideas.