Taking the liberty to speak for the gods -- or at least for myself, if not -- We're quite happy to support any efforts to improve the site's UX, within certain constraints:

• it can't break "backward compatibility"; that is, members who want their experience to remain unchanged should not be impacted at all.
• it can't significantly impact performance. that is, having a slicker UI can't come at the cost of 10x page load times, for example.
• it can be done within the framework of the existing engine. among other things, that means that any new "code" must not require access to, or to live on, the filesystem. "Everything is a node", i.e. it lives in the database. (There could be very limited allowances made, possibly.)
• possibly others.

I'm quite gung ho about this myself, and would probably have already done a lot of what people are demanding except that my web dev chops are meager.
I keep trying to recruit js/ajax/jquery/node/frobnitz experts to come in and work some magic, but so far none have stepped forward.
Consider this another appeal. :-)
Of course, there's a learning curve, whichever side one approaches from. Be assured that I stand ready to mentor anyone who wants to bring their web dev chops and is willing to learn how the pm engine works.
But as you imply, it would be good to have a plan, an outline of what we hope to achieve.

Releated: Please see my recent post, Development of PerlMonks "Mobile" is now open for business.

It's understandable that an admin doesn't want to add more code on top of a pile of unmaintainable code.

But that's exactly how Perl[Monks] became the glorious mess of awesomeness that it is!