Hi Daniel, all,
The topic of making the IDE feel more simple has always been a long discussed one. All the points you mention are entirely valid, some of them were already discussed and have history on mailing-lists or bugzilla, some of them are new.
For a more general approach to this problem, I would personally also strongly question the existence and usage of the Java perspective, particularly if you start with a comparison with VSCode. VSCode has 5 kind-of perspectives: Explorer, Search, Team, Run/Debug and Extensions. The Platform already provides Explorer, Team and Run/Debug ones. VSCode has no language-specific perspectives, because overall developing in language X is the same activity and requires the same workflows and tools than developing in language Y, its perspectives are language-agnostic enough (so is Eclipse's Project Explorer).
So from here, I would personally recommend that if one wants to push the Eclipse IDE into a fresher look and feel, deprecating and stopping usage of the Java perspective and other language-specific perspectives all together in the packages would probably have a better impact than adding yet-another-perspective to the long list of existing ones. Adding UI elements and giving more choice to users is rarely perceived a UI simplification, people tend to prefer guidance over choice.
Another aspect where VSCode differs in the absence of "main" toolbar. This can work with Eclipse IDE too, there is already an option for that, and Ctrl+3 in Eclipse IDE maps the Ctrl+P in VSCode well. Disabling the toolbar by default wouldn't be so hard to do. Sure, some users would be disturbed at first sight; but those could reenable the toolbar easily if they want.
I personally have made my Eclipse IDE mimic VSCode on all those aspects (start from an SDK to avoid Mylyn and other useless extensions that come with EPP package, removed toolbars, minimized open views, perspective switch on the left with only Project Explorer, Debug and Team) and the experience is very good IMO, and I've seen people impressed by the simplicity of Eclipse IDE when looking at such configuration and comparing it with the memory of how "cluttered" Eclipse was to them when they were users. The Eclipse IDE is fully capable of achieving similar simplicity already; the question is more how much the maintainers community is ready to push "disturbance" to its users to make simplicity a priority over conservatism.
Cheers
