Definitely, "feels dated" is very subjective. The other problem ("I feel like I'm fighting with the tool", "I'm jumping all over the place to do what I want") m

Definitely, "feels dated" is very subjective. The other problem ("I feel like I'm fighting with the tool", "I'm jumping all over the place to do what I want") may be related to your "UI tetris" point, and I may be unnecessarily tying it to the UI feeling "dated". ISTM that what is needed is to observe how people interact with the tool and then try to figure out how the workflow can be improved based on those observations. Or maybe I'm trying to interact with gerrit in some strange way - that's also possible. The +1 / +2 for different labels aren't that confusing to me - additionally, in Chromium I found that gerrit is very descriptive when you on-mouse-over the buttons, but IDK if it's specific to this deployment or if that aspect got improved.