I have the same feeling that you do. But for some reason some stuff has been broken on GNOME that did not require breaking. My three biggest pain points (both personally and for the non-tech people i provide tech support with) is alt-tab not switching between all open window in recent order usage, the disappearance of the venerable systray, and .desktop files not proposing to be executed (at least on Debian).
These three points are contrary to every other desktop environment there is, and it's confusing the hell out of people. I really wish GNOME the best and i really like some aspects of it (it's pretty and it's well-integrated) but over the years they've dumped core features like this, and made the overall experience super slow. If you've tried to run GNOME on second-hand hardware with HDD (not SSD) you know what i'm talking about.