Here's a little something to get the taste of the recent Thief reboot out of your mouth. Industrious, possibly Hammerite modders have been working on a Gold mod for Deadly Shadows for a while now , which among other things removes the loading transitions that were a bit of an annoyance in the original game. While these haven't been excised from the tutorial or the between-mission city hub—and by 'excised' I mean the constituent map parts have been carefully stitched together—the nine main missions have been lovingly reworked. Thief 3 Gold has just left beta, if you want to try it out .
Thief 3 Gold goes beyond shoving map parts together, however: it also redesigns the bits where loading would have occurred, and makes it so that you don't have to nick the Widow Moira's inheritance on Expert difficulty, among other tweaks. 1.0 won't be the final version of the mod, obviously, but expect it to be integrated into Deadly Shadows' big Sneaky Upgrade mod eventually, which fixes a ton of issues with Eidos' hobbled Thief threequel.
Will Thief 4 receive the same care and attention sometime down the line? We can only hope. One quick fix that would make the game roughly 53.86% better would be to remove that abysmal Thief-Taker General character from the game.
Important stealth reminder: the excellent Dark Mod is now standalone.