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As I see it, you are talking more about exposure than choice. I agree having GNOME on the spotlights will draw people to it and stuff will get fixed and possibly better. Never liked Unity but didn't use it ever either.

And having defaults doesn't imply a lack of choice IMO. It is still easy to change DEs on a vanilla Ubuntu as it should be. I don't bother with the variants, I just install vanilla Ubuntu and install my DE of choice in place.

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All true. We're all free to install any DE environment we want. But defaults are definitely useful to the entry level Linux users. I would love to see the day when the first (and easiest) choice for Joe Dad and Mary Mum setting up a computer for themselves and their kids is Linux with an easy to use DE instead of Win10/MacOS, with defaults that include LibreOffice instead of Pages/Office365, Firefox instead of Safari/Edge, and more.

Yes, many distros offer this out of the box right now, but it's not at the forefront of Joe-average's mind, because it's still not easy enough.

I just think that if there was less fragmentation (see my Linux Mint XEd example above), we could make much faster progress toward a FOSS world for the average user. Note, I'm talking about less fragmentation - not zero fragmentation.

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