Honestly, the current state of mainstream desktop environments -- open source or proprietary -- is pretty awful with the exception of perhaps KDE and little ones like XFCE and LXDE. It kind of makes me glad I didn't hop on the GNOME train in the late 90s -- I could see the awful coming even back then -- and just stuck with a bare WM.

We've seen, again and again, that popularity has absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or even lack of overt user-hostility.

The IBus case is classic example - There was high-handed declaration that having one single global IME state is "easier" for users. The problem is when you regularly have to use languages that are incompatible in writing systems and input methods. Whether its one of the CJK or switching between one of the cyrillic variants and latin, life is much easier when you can have separate input state between let's say an Instant Messenger and your IDE.

For me, I recall the "canary in the coal mine" was when they refused (despite earlier promises and roadmaps) to re-implement certain things related to printing, again in a way that probably didn't bother the developers.

A similar case involves all the very deep integration with systemd, where they essentially declared that there's one Operating System under the Sun and its name is Fedora.

And it might feel more polished than Windows 10 on surface, yes. But then it's much less capable and the resources in Windows go towards things like not breaking people's software and behaviours.