I made a mockup for a Gnome Control Center improvement.

Your idea for placing the Gnome Control Center icon in the top "System" menu is very good. It is clearer than for example in Ubuntu where they list all options in a sub menu.

But your Control Center solution has one big disadvantage:

There are many options left out there, for example customizing the toolbar look.

OK you tried to simplify the Control Center which is fine, but now some Gnome settings like choosing the "Multimedia Systems selector" is now in the menu:

> Applications > System > Configuration > Multimedia Systems selector

The options are getting spread over different points which is not very user friendly and the Gnome control CENTER looses the function as being a CENTRAL configuration point for users.

So I made a mockup for a control center improvement. There it divides settings in "Basic Settings" and "Advanced Settings". The names can differ.

If you do it like this the Gnome control center really is a central configuration point where all configurations can easily set. With this suggestions beginners are not overhelmed with lots of settings if they click on the control center button but can easy click on the "Advanced tab" if they wanna see the other options.

See attached screenshot.