Nala is a very fast drop-in replacement for apt.
The speed improvement is due to parallellizing as much as possible.
Also, less important, it looks quite good 
I found out about nala only yesterday.
Here is a screenshot:
nala is in the standard repository so it is only a sudo apt install nala away 
From the description:
Nala is a frontend for the APT package manager. It has a lot
of the same functionality, but formats the output to be more
human readable. Also implements a history function to see past
transactions and undo/redo them. Much like Fedora's dnf history.
It doesn't actually replace APT nor is it a clone,just a frontend. Also it hasn't been updated in 5 years.
That is 100% correct. I think I did not make myself clear enough.
It only replaces the APT frontend we daily use: the apt command.
It does not replace the APT package manager suite (which incorporates the whole APT config /etc/apt/*, all libapt-* libraries and quite some commands like apt, apt-get, apt-cache, aptitude, apt-transport etc etc).
It is a bit confusing that APT (the whole suite mentioned above) has the same name as its frontend we daily use ( apt )
So, many tnx for bringing this up
That is not uncommon for code with low complexity that leans on a highly stable API. There is not much to fix if it ain't broken.
Most of the heavy lifting is done by the libapt-* libraries anyway, which are used by more or less all apt frontends.
