The point of this "first impressions" exercise was to explore the happy path.
> It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting.
I would agree with that sentiment, though I didn't want to get into that flame war today. I think a lot of other people have already written extensively on this subject and I don't feel I can contribute anything new. Here are some relevant articles...
Several of these are about CSDs, which I think are a big point of contention with respect to the design philosophy of GTK/Gnome 3.X. This list does not include much about the KDE/Qt side, which I'm less familiar with.
I would certainly like to expand the side of this list on the "Pro Gnome" side in the interest of a more fair and balanced debate.
Pro Gnome 3.x:
Client-Side Decorations Initiative - https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD
Restyling apps at scale - https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
Introducing the CSD Initiative - https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/01/26/csd-initiative/
Against Gnome 3.x:
Why do we keep building rotten foundations? - https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-build...
GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes - https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
Torvalds on Gnome - https://web.archive.org/web/20190313090648/https://plus.goog...
Sway and client side decorations - https://drewdevault.com/2018/01/27/Sway-and-client-side-deco...
Server side decorations and Wayland - https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-d...
The problem with GNOME 3 - https://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/the-problem-with-gn...