I'm not sure why you guys are talking about loss in productivity with the ribbon unless it's purely because you spent a lot of time learning the menu based version, now you have to learn something new.  The old tool bars were completely disorganized and took for ever for me to find anything.  With the ribbon, everything is right there in front of you with a nice, descriptive picture of the task.  I find the pictorial versions much easier and faster to pick out of a pile of tasks than a textual form.  I'm pretty sure you are just so familiar with the old version that you are annoyed that you have to go through the same learning process as before. However, this time, it should be faster to learn where everything is because it's organized so much better.

I also don't now what you are talking about with the new paint.  Its "Home" tab on the ribbon exposes all of the tasks that you would do commonly.  The only other tab is "View", which you can access just as fast (or faster) than the old menu driven version.