Oooh, coopted? That makes sense. I've always felt like Gnome's direction is exactly the pathetic outcome that would occur when 20 devs in a trenchcoat try to act like Steve Jobs, but I never dug into the specifics.
The easiest way to make things clear and consistent is to have less things, the idea is you have a clean base then figure out how to add the things people are still wanting the most. If you had whole development teams working on these things then that would work (see macOS) but without that people implement the simplest parts and avoid the rest due to it not being fun, not having an agreed design for them, the design being too contentious, or just a lack of time.
then gnome was coopted and took a nosedive and OEM went back to using microsoft for everything. and ubuntu had to write their own shell to survive because gnome tought it would be smart to ship a broken 2.x version with no settings app