Gnome: "We are not designing a desktop for people who …"

It's so sad having to watch GNOME going down the drain. I have been a longtime GNOME user, basically since KDE 2 came out :-) and have always been happy with it. With the last Ubuntu version I also switched to Unity and - guess what - I love it. But anyways, I don't write a rave review on Unity.

I tried Fedora 15 and GNOME 3 out of curiosity and I'm impressed of how little the configuration possibilites are. And that's compared to Unity! In those few days that I used the GNOME Shell I came across most of the problems listed in the article. Most of them appeared to me in the first hour of usage or even before having the system installed. Change Font? Nope. What do when I close my laptop? Nope. etc etc. And when you finally decide that GNOME 3 needs a little more incubation (as with KDE 4 and GNOME 2 IIRC) and want to reboot I am forced to open a terminal and reboot from there or logout and then reboot. SRSLY?

And now this default-terminal-cannot-be-changed thing... I get the feeling that the GNOME developers don't want anyone but themselves to use it. I mean, their goal of having an intuitive GUI was honorable but they missed it. Completely. IMHO, if no one intervenes now the whole project is going to sink into insignificance. :-(

edit: Oh, and don't get me wrong I don't want to descredit any of the GNOME developers. I mean, the above is still my personal opinion (and possibly that of many others) but that does not change my respect for their work and commitment to project. Let's hope all this comes to a good end.