Tomasz-
Without that it was much less readable. Edit is obviously more important than "Editing help", and RC and "Special pages" are obviously more important than "Image list" or "New pages"
Actually, the latter is not obvious. The most important page from "Special pages" is already in the quickbar (Preferences), the rest is of limited interest to most users. I have no idea why "Image list" is in the quickbar at all, and "New pages" is used quite a lot by some people.
No, this new policy is plain breaindead. There just has to be some wiki for random code changes
Why? I frankly don't see the reason. If you want to make "random code changes", there's no need to use the Wikimedia servers. Use your own machine. If you want to demonstrate and test reasonably complete changes, commit to CVS unstable and update the test.wiki accordingly.
Regards,
Erik