Image editing is one of those great examples of the workflows being so diverse that no generalized interface solution will be very good for all of them.
What's tickling my brain at the moment is the idea that these complex apps might be better as languages first, just shipping with thousands of well-organized example scripts that cover all the bread and butter - in the same way that synthesizers moved towards being preset-centric over time, to the point where one of the big features of new VST plugins is the content they ship with and the ease of browsing it.
There are ways forward. For instance, instead of a small number of tools which mutate their state, why not let the user clone variants of the tools which are configured differently.
Let me configure two or more copies of the move tool, one configured for layers and one for selections. Let me give them different icons and let me position it in a custom toolbox.
Don't make me do the equivalent of swapping bits on a multi-bit screwdriver. I'm not a mobile handyman trying to save space and weight in a portable toolbox; I can afford to replicate the handle and shaft for each bit.
The gimp already has this feature. It's called presets and it works well enough. Just set up your tool exactly the way you want it and then save a preset. You can even configure the preset so some settings (such as colour) pass through the preset.
If it exists in the version I'm using, it is certainly not discoverable. I don't see any hint of this in a two-level-deep manual search of various menus. I would expect to find osmething like this if I right click on the toolbox (context menu pops up, with one of the choices being "Add New Preset ..." or whatever). Or in the Tools menu, with a menu item being "Manage presets ..." or whatever.
Ah, finally found it. You have to click on the little docking triangle on some specific Tool Options dialog for a given tool. It is in this docking-related menu that a command is found to bring up the Tool Options Menu! I think I didn't notice it before because it's totally "off topic" for docking. (Why would a semantically important feature be found under a little docking triangle?) It is this Tool Options Menu which has the preset management commands.
If you right click anywhere on the Tool Options, you get context menu with one-button context menu which says "Tool Options". When you click that button, it just disappears: there you are in Tool Options as before! Right clicking on a Tool Options object would be the obvious place to have the Tool Options Menu. Then the preset stuff would be more discoverable.
Not the point. Obviously we can think about ways to avoid each specific problem that each user might have. But developer resources are limited and you can't chase all user's problems.
If you want this worked on, you should contribute to the project. Not saying you need to learn how to actually code on Gimp, but just to add your voice to the mix.
What's tickling my brain at the moment is the idea that these complex apps might be better as languages first, just shipping with thousands of well-organized example scripts that cover all the bread and butter - in the same way that synthesizers moved towards being preset-centric over time, to the point where one of the big features of new VST plugins is the content they ship with and the ease of browsing it.