From initial post "all those icons on the Tool-Bar have equivalents in the drop-down menus"
Yes, and some of them have key-combo equivalents too. I hardly ever use these buttons at all except for the dictionary button. I mostly use the Toolbar to have something to click on in order to-make IDE the foreground app when it's been in the background. I use the contextual menus a lot which some of these, like 'edit group', are also accessible from. Too much redundancy. I'd rather have a button to open the Images and Objects libraries UI stack.
I still think using SVG based rather than pixels is the way to go for best appearance with scalability on increasingly higher-density screens. Could use color SVG with the drawing library to use them the same way you would pixel imageData.
Although I also like the auto inherited properties that are possible with SVG Widget based icons, that makes darkmode color change automatic on macOS, it's the same behavior as classic graphic controls too by the way.
Speaking of widgets, I saw on that LC new features announcement that they're changing syntax to allow 'button' or 'field' to also refer to widgets, which makes absolutely no sense to me... and don't tell me it's because "that's better".
Improvements
New Widget Syntax
Refer to widgets as fields & buttons in script.
That's better.
set the color of button "i am a widget" to "blue"