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Many years ago I started developing libgreattao framework, with aims to allow to define multiple UI's for many applications. For example many disk burning tools could uses the same UI, but one burning tool could have many UI's + text shell + etc ... The goal is to allow dynamically create UI, load UI defined by user/system vendor, allow to hide unnecessary option by use by modifying xml document, etc...

I don't have time now to complete libgreattao, but I have some ideas, which probably are better.

Many programs written using Qt allows to define panel/menu content. KDevelop allow to use many work type (debugging, developing, merging, etc.). I will to introduce similar ideas to many KDE tools.

Task type is a group of visible menu/panels/etc.options and position of each, which user could download/define by themselves. For each app there could exist default task type for each activity. Task type also can override settings and could override window themes.

Dolphin could have art album task type, which show previews of files, hides information panel, hides top panel and menu, etc.

Kate could have html editing task, which allow to set encoding, show document/files panels, etc.
Kate could have letter task, which allow to send document via e-mail (as attachment), set language of document, etc.

Why write many tools, which made the same things, but differs in GUI? Not better using more generic tool, but restrict GUI by defining it by ourselves or downloading via web?

If somebody agree with this idea and help me a little, I will try to implement it.

Well, at least some of the applications have capabilities to be able to adjust their layouts in some of the ways that you suggest.
I have seen that at least some applications have ui.rc (xml) files in the user's config directories which define the current layout (panels, toolbars, etc).
It may be just a matter of being able to save multiple copies of these layout files for quick switching and loading.

There's also the matter that a lot of shared functionality is already captured in shared libraries (be it qt, kde frameworks or other libraries), so it's not like there's much duplication between apps which provide similar functionality (except possibly for storing their configs separately). Presumably it shouldn't be too hard to write e.g. another filemanager which depends on all of the things that Dolphin depends on but presents this alternative layout.

On the other hand, it's often better to have dedicated tools for different tasks rather than bundling everything into one big be-all-end-all application (like Konqueror)