RedHat made the decision based on their commercial interests, not technical merit, and since RedHat de facto controls GNOME anyone who wanted to keep shipping GNOME had to fall into line. Debian were probably the only distro who had enough clout to push back against GNOME, and there was a bitter political fight there (the decision was certainly not based on technical merit, nor did the committee even follow their own rules). Slackware wisely chose to drop GNOME but most distros didn't dare; Ubuntu tried to go their own way for a while but they couldn't maintain everything on their own.

Honestly the whole thing made me more or less give up on open-source as a development model. Good programmers are expensive, especially if you want them to do the boring maintenance work, and that funding has to come from somewhere. The "give the program away for free and sell consulting" business model works up to a point, but it distorts maintainers' interests away from what would actually benefit the majority of users. While I do blame RedHat, the real problem is that no-one except RedHat is paying people to work full-time on GNOME or any of dozens of similarly important projects (KDE seems to be mostly funded by the EU, which is a much healthier model, but I don't know if you could make a whole distribution from projects like that).