Er, this is coming a bit out of the blue, right, and I’m not sure what "everything looks 2012"even means? In 2012, we released Krita 2.4. This is what Krita looked like back then:
So, yes, while keeping the fundamental interface intact, I feel we’ve made Krita look a lot more polished, with new icons, updated layer panel, improved popup palette…
And anyway, newcomers to Krita usually say that they felt immediately familiar with the application, and long-time users are happy we’re not forcing them to learn a new interface with every release. Given that Krita has got about 3,000,000 users currently, I guess that the current interface is not, actually, driving people away?
As for “when” something will happen – Krita is free and open source software. If you feel you can contribute improvements, do.