About the rewriting of the HIG, I would like to say that I agree with you that it could be great if the HIG has a task oriented section that gathers all the guidelines for a kind of layout.
IMHO, the detailed section should stay if anybody wants more details and could be linked from the task oriented sections for example.

What could be very useful for developers would be some HIG compliant widgets/layouts in Glade so that gnome/gtk apps could be a minimum HIG compliant even of the developper doesn’t have time to comply with the HIG or simply doesn’t know about it.

Personally, as a developper, what I used to appreciate in the HIG is the technical sections giving the Glade parameters needed to have a compliant layout.

It was my two cents worth…

Having small guides by type of UI would be great. Maybe both can co-exists as severals quick guide and one master reference.