The Control Panel was also called "Dashboard". Probably the reason of the initial icon. However as part of JUX work we unified the terminology to the one that was most used "Control Panel". One of the plans of JUX was to add a module to the Control Panel with a few stats (but that lacked time and energy because of multiple PR rewrites unfortunately). If someone has a bit of time to write a begin of a stats module, with e.g. # of articles, # of new articles in last month, same for users, same for visits, then, together with the existing "stats" list of articles, the icon already choosen before this PR would make full sense imho.

Icons are really also a matter of consistency and of personal taste. I personally think that the gears icon is not the right one either at this time, because it is meaning "Settings" and too ressemblant to the Settings gear icon. Right now we have popular and latest articles, which is a sort of gauge of success of the site. When we add the stats icons (WordPress, Drupal and most blogging platforms have that upfront) then it will make whole sense. Kyle from JUX 3.0 team had that vision too (even with graphs) in his Control Panel mockup. It would be a quick and impressive win.

I agree that the dashboard icon doesnt look quite right at that size and weight. But we are already using the cog in the top right so why not one of the home icons?

@brianteeman interesting idea. Home icon could be the right one. Or even the Joomla one, as clicking anywhere on the Joomla top left goes there.

Thanks for the feedback, guys! I switched it to home-2 and I think it looks great:

If the stats module is added, we can switch the icon to one of the stats icons, if needed.

This was fixed in 8661506

Thanks!