Why do people minimize windows?

I don't really worry much about depth as such, since I don't do overlapping windows on the same desktop very much. An exception is when I'm using the GIMP, in which case I run in to this problem all the time. If a WM could provide a better way (in addition to but not instead of the current ways) to make sets of windows visible and invisible, that would help a little.

For the GIMP I'd like a way to make the floating palette windows appear under my mouse when I want them, then disappear when I don't. Alt+Tab switching them to in front of my image window(s) and then clicking the image window to "send the palette away" is my current best solution, but it's really not ideal. I've considered adding a "lower one" button to my title bars, but the problem of bringing them back remains. (You can have a LOT of GIMP palettes and image windows in your Alt+Tab window focus list.) I'd like a way to temporarily make the focused window be not there, like for 2 seconds, to give me time to raise a window that was behind it, then have it reappear stacked below the window I just raised.

When doing image manipulation it is a truism that you cannot have too much screen space, so keeping toolboxes always visible is just irrelevant. I'm sure this is true for other generally-full-screen activity. There has to be a better way to manage floating, overlapping windows when you have to have them all on one workspace. I don't think the Gnome Shell approach is a very good answer partially because it's very disruptive for a trivial window focus swap type operation. It seems to have been designed more for task switching than focus switching.