Giving the user every option he/she possibly could want is not necessarily good design. Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place. Leaving the user with a lot of noise.
The point is, flexibility is not by itself a sign of bad design (or avoiding design decisions). Good design is choosing sane defaults for the average user, and providing discoverable and understandable configuration options for the power user.
I'm not saying that good design is directly correlated to the number of configuration options. Some configuration options are genuinely indicative of bad underlying design, and can be removed once a better design is in place. But when you remove configuration options for the sake of removing configuration options, you obtain Gnome 3.
I think that KDE has had so much FUD thrown at it that people just have a negative view of it right away. Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro put it out (When KDE stated it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE till about 4.7.
KDE put it out, everyone complained it was terrible, unstable and not ready, then KDE called it a beta.
People that are intimidated by buttons should use Gnome, they will remove everything that is possible from the options dialog.
The defaults seem very sensible in my experience. Having the freedom to customise it further doesn't seem like a bad thing but perhaps I'm just old-skool.