Wordpress 2.5 Admin UI

So I know lots of people are stoked about the enhancements to the Wordpress 2.5 admin interface, but after a few weeks of use I’m left wanting. There are a lot of great enhancements visually and some nice usability fixes but a couple of the biggest problems I’ve had from pre-2.5 were not addressed:

1. Quick nav for Write/Manage. They still force you to click twice just to write or manage a page. And while post writing/editing is far and away the most common pair of actions, there needs to be a way to easily flow into the page management functionality.

2. Quickly adding pages/posts from manage UI. Particularly with pages you cannot ‘add new’ without 2 additional clicks. I seriously doubt this is an overlooked issue, but quite thought out and deliberate, however, just feel cumbersome when setting up new projects and adding/editing lots of pages.

3. No customizable admin menu. Both of these issues could be conquered by a simple admin enhancement to support a user-configurable menu to promote most used actions to the top-most level. I don’t need quick access to design once the site’s deployed, neither do most users. So let me demote/remove that action from the list and add things I could really use.

Ultimately it’s an out-of-the-box vs. power user issue. With a few hours of work I could probably put together fixes for all of these…but they seem to be more core than a plugin.