Version 2.8 may bring a combined Transform tool (Scale, Rotate, Shear, Flip and Perspective), more use of Cairo for beautiful antialiased graphics and more usability improvements. We will also make GIMP use more of GEGL, namely for projection (everything you see in a visible stack of layers). This will be another step to version 3.0, which will bring long requested features like support for 16+ bits per channel and adjustment layers, to name a few.