Often you see people say that the GIMP is too complicated and they are looking for a simpler alternative.
I think it would be a useful feature to have a tick box in the preferences that says "Simple Menus" and it hid all but the basic commands from the Menu Bar.
To be completely flexible (as you will invariably have people who don't want everything but want more than the basic) you could have a "Custom Menu" option that allowed you to pick and choose the items in the Menu manually.
What do you think?
I decided to try to see if I could attempt this with xml config by modifying share/gimp/2.0/menus/image-menu.xml
The original menus are still available if you right-click on the editor so functionality is not completely lost.
For instance, the edit section in the file now has
<menu action="" name="Edit">
<placeholder name="Undo">
<menuitem action=""> <menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<separator/>
<placeholder name="Cut">
<menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<placeholder name="Copy">
<menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<placeholder name="Paste">
<menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<menu action="" name="Paste as">
<menuitem action=""> <menuitem action=""> </menu>
<separator/>
<placeholder name="Clear">
<menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<placeholder name="Fill">
<menuitem action=""> <menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<separator/>
<placeholder name="Preferences">
<menuitem action=""
<menuitem action=""> </placeholder>
<separator/>
</menu>