Hi,
Not a small task indeed. But what you are telling is already in the contrib CVS. The docs are not yet there, still in word format. Have to convert to html once I think they are ok. Installation is still not out of the box, it will progress little by little.
I think other CMS solutions like Midgard, eZ, etc. has an ok UI, a lot better than what we have. In fact if someone really thinks that one of them is good, why not make a UI package something similar. Probably the best OSS CMS UI I have used is OpenCMS, looks nice.
