Kamion - I totally understand about P9.  Comfort with your tool is really important.  Just to let you know, you can make everything that floats in P7 float in P8 and P9 as well.   That said, I can comfortably shrink my PP 2012 screen to about 1/4 of my screen, where P7 I really could only work at full screen.  I generally find that the new interface has much less dead space for icons and labels that are the same size or smaller.   I'm pretty definitely missing something in terms of what  you're looking for and not finding in the P9 interface, so I'm not betting floating the panels will make things better for you.   I just figured you might not know.

FFD - Just to warn, Fastscatter behaves very strangely and inconsistently when you add lights.  It technically shouldn't do anything at all without lights because it's a shading node, and shouldn't affect BionicRooster's material at all.  I'm betting that it does affect it, which shows how unpredictably it behaves.  That's the reason you don't see Fastscatter skin materials everywhere, why there were all sorts of SSS kluges before P9.  It was completely unreliable, with raytraced shadows producing major errors.