Having so many panels open at one time can get a bit confusing. Personally, I almost always get the Sampling and Light Paths panels mixed up.
If you want to collapse all the panels except the one you want to see, simply Ctrl + Click the header of the panel.
Here’s a post by quollism on a thread on BA discussing funding a UI coder (or 20). It’s a long read, but definitely worth it (or if you’re lazy, see the tldr at the end):
As a working software developer who read “Don’t Make Me Think” years before Andrew Price did as part of my job, let’s have a sober assessment of this UI proposal.
There’s a lot of good ideas in here. This is a much kinder program to use than the Blender we currently have. The tabs could work, I’d rather have the notifications panel than the damn outliner, and I could probably live without RMB select as long as I can keep MMB for camera view because it rocks. (In fact, I could probably do without single-click 3D cursor placement entirely.) There’s a fair bit of stuff in here that would be relatively trivial to implement.
But overall what’s being proposed is frankly a way more expensive program to develop and maintain. We are never going to see this in a hundred years from the Blender Foundation with its current level of development resources. Something this richly helpful is going to be difficult to keep giving people free of charge.