Sorry, but I can't agree. You don't need preview or save buttons if you're in distraction free mode. You should use that mode to write the full post, without any interruption in the writing/thinking flow. If you are fixing typos, formatting, or testing the previews (stuff that you'd normally do once you're done writing), why are you in distraction free mode? You're not writing, you are doing something else, which is by itself a distraction.

And about the other ideas (except for the inverted editor colors, which is the only point I can agree with in the whole post) are about changing the layout of the content field. But by doing that, you'd break the seamless change between normal mode and distraction free mode, and I think that's a terrible idea. Terrible. I find the way it works now to be super productive, it does what it's supposed to do, and nothing else. You take everything but what you are writing out of the way, but if you need anything else, you just need to move the mouse. And you don't even need to see the meta boxes before moving the cursor in the correct directions, because we all know already where everything is.

The new version is better, faster and more productive. I think that you just want the old version back, but that's plugin territory now.