Why don't you simply retain productivity by dropping gnome? After all this isn't exactly the first time they have dropped a feature people were peeved about.
I do try to shop around every few years, but return to Gnome. KDE is perpetually never quite right. Visual clutter, forcing desktop metaphors like Activities on me, and poor integration (read: different toolkit) with the things I actually use.
I agree, I should leave. But doing that is even more change. At some point I just need to get some work done. I'll moan and groan and maybe one day Gnome governance will stop individuals vandalising the project's applications without community buy-in.
>forcing Activities As corroboration for rejecting this I'll admit I've been using KDE Plasma for a long time and I still haven't bothered to figure out what they do. Not only are they not forced, their discoverability is 0.
>poor integration with GTK apps The context menu hover looks different, but apart from that non-CSD apps arguably look more at home than in Gnome 3
I don't know why I felt the need to defend a desktop, but I get the impression that Plasma is judged by its defaults rather than its possibilities.
Unfortunately they're still susceptible to GTK maintainers bad decisions but despite that they're still a breath of fresh air compared to GNOME.