To it's credit, the project has, over that time, made some significant improvements to its UI. (Starting the GTK project to replace Lesstif/Motif and adding single-window mode come to mind immediately.)

The question is really this: what is the best way for the project to effectively use this contribution to improve it's product? Knowing what professional UX work costs, it's not surprising to me that they decided to direct this grant to supporting their existing developers and trying to bring in a few more with a Hackathon or two.