These are really good ideas. Ross, or someone who's willing, please write exact design white-paper with visual examples for FreeDesktop.Org, ESPECIALLY radial menu concept that would work wonders for mice, gamepads, touchpad, gesture-controls, all point-type devices, so they could be expressed in Wayland protocol specifications and implemented in common ways among W-compliant WM/DEs that are supposed to replace entire GNU/Linux & F/OSS GUI infrastructure of the past, that is based on X11. It can be posted https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues for programmers to figure out. Points about proper palettes should also be relayed to GUI design committees of common DEs, such as KDE and Gnome, they indeed deliberately copying stupid crap from Windows and MacOS. Campaigning for them to stop that and start thinking again would be nice.
Although, it's possible that all underlying infrastructure already exists and the problem is visual design and implementation. By the way, Wayland allows creating fully 3D DEs, video-game style, not just window layers. But we would need actual experience VG UI designers to achieve that, like ones working on economical strategies with big data-sheets and complex controls. There were notable 3D DE experiments, such as Project Looking Glass that Steve Jobs smothered, SGI's IRIX and Metisse.
And here's some obligatory F/OSS DE goodness (if you can call degradation of KDE 3 to 4 and 5 that) bragging (wallpapers are upscaled with legendary waifu2x-converter-cpp with OpenCL GPU acceleration):
* KDE3 with amaroK audio manager on Qt3:
* KDE3 on 16:9 display with Quake-style terminal:
* LXQt with jamin audio processing on JACK:
* KDE4 with Conky with "now-playing" menu for Clementine, Qt4 amaroK fork:
* KDE5 on Qt5 featuring Calf & LSP JACK plugins and Strawberry, Clementine fork: