A Plea to Canonical: Ubuntu UI design - desktop icons and workspaces

Dear Canonical,
There are two key areas in which the Ubuntu desktop is deficient:

1) The spacing between desktop icons is fixed (or at least, not openly and easily available via tools such as Unity Tweak). The spacing between icons is, in fact, extremely wide. Even Windows has a straight-forward facility to change this value. It affects the way in which one arranges icons on the desktop, and thus my productivity when I deal with several icons. Users need a facility to change the between-icon spacing in an arbitrary way while MAINTAINING the alignment, thus allowing grouping of icons and spatial placement of icons closer to the screen margins to facilitate workflow. With such a tool one would need an option that controls the caption below the icon in a sensible way, e.g. reflowing of long captions or only showing the first part of the caption.

2) I get the impression that the workspace concept is being phased out since workspaces are switched OFF by default on my latest installation (15.04). Not all users are so dumb as most Windows users who only use a single workspace. This is a facility that strongly promotes screen use and, consequently, productivity. A strong workspace facility is one of the things that helps to put Ubuntu ahead of competing UIs. Currently, I a) need to switch workspaces ON and then b) I need to click TWICE to perform a workspace change. This is a marked regression since Gnome 2 which had a single task bar icon with on-icon area sensitivity with which a single click allowed the selection of a particular workspace. This disappeared with Unity. Now this requires a click of the workspace icon and a second click to select the particular workspace. The keyboard shortcut of CTL-ALT-arrow is useful but totally counterintuitive for the user that depends largely on the GUI to perform tasks. A single-click solution to change workspaces would materially facilitate the use of this facility.

Please help us to make Ubuntu so far superior to its desktop competitors that users will automatically prefer Ubuntu!
Kind regards,
Willem Ferguson, Pretoria, South Africa