Hi I’m an Add-ons developer.
There is a bit of a difference in demand between power users and beginners. Beginners want simple features, but power users want advanced features. In this AnkiForums power users and developers are the main users, so if you want to optimize for beginners you may want to do a survey in the Anki subreddit.
And there is already a lot of discussion, ideas, and survey on AnkiForums to make using Anki for desktop easier, so you may find some good ideas by checking the suggestions category, there are many good ideas and discussions but there is a lack of advanced developers. Suggestions - Anki Forums
You may already know it, the official Anki is in the process of migrating to Svelte, so I think major changes to the UI will be made after they are done. (but I don’t develop the desktop, so I don’t know exactly how progress it is.) Discussion: Anki's Svelte future
Though unrelated to the desktop, one of the big change recently is that Anki’s website is now open source. This allows developers to contribute. Since Ankihub is developing a sophisticated website with many images and animations, it might be helpful to the developers if you could provide some information. Discussion: Creation of new landing page Github: GitHub - ankitects/anki-landing-page