“The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.
It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y."
If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead.
It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.