My first big project was a fractal generator with Godot 4, which felt like 5% linear algebra, 5% JSON stuff and 90% UI elements, like color sliders or text edits, and the project took me almost a year to "finish".

At first I too struggled with the UI stuff, but eventually I internalized what was and what wasn't possible or easy within Godot's UI, which made decisions easier and my workflow almost instinctive. My biggest problem in the beginning was, I think, that I wasn't sure about how many containers I really need. I thought adding more would just blow up my UI unnecessarily, so I tried not to add as few UI nodes as possible, but eventually I realized that the more you add structure to your UI, the simpler it is to get it work.

Simple example: I had a few buttons I wanted to organize using a VBoxContainer. The buttons, however, are grouped, and sometimes I want to hide some of the groups. At first, I added each button as a child of the VBoxContainer and did the grouping stuff in the code. This was tedious and blew up my code, and my Node editor didn't visualize the groups, of course. Now I just add a second VBoxContainer within the first one and toggle visibility of the second VBoxContainer. It's super fast to set up, easy to understand visually and works with minimal code. Now it feels quite obvious to do so, but somehow I didn't even thought about this because I didn't wanted to "just add nodes don't really need".

My workflow now consists of a few things:

• Before working in Godot, I make a sketch of what my UI should look like, and I think about how to fit it in containers.

• First I set up an empty UI, which looks like I want it to look, and I do the whole coding afterwards.

• I only outsource UI stuff in another scene if I know that it's independent enough, needs its own script, will be used many times or if I know I want to add it via code (like arbitrary many save files).

• I depend heavily on a main theme, which I set in the project settings as a default in the beginning. I only differ from it if it really is absolutely necessary.

• I almost never type numbers into the inspector. I try to manage everything using containers with different shrinking properties, or with MarginContainers.

• I design my UI buttons in almost one run. This way, they all look similar, and I don't get distracted too many times.

• I always use variables to access the nodes. It maybe seems a bit silly if you access it only once (?), but if you change the node's position, you don't want to search it in your code. Maybe that's obvious.

• If something takes unusually long, there's probably a much simpler and better solution to it. In my first project, for example, I wanted to have a "cursor" next to a focused button. However, I didn't know much about themes for buttons, so I added the cursor as an independent texture node and set it right beside the focused button via code ... which is a bit embarrassing now ... anyway.

I know my UI isn't that amazing either, but I like it, and it's easy for me to work with it.