Gnome after version 1, definitely after version 2 is a symptom of the "software is never done" fallacy. After building a solid, performant and working desktop environment, instead of leaving it alone and start making other applications, they decided to just keep doing stuff.. and how do you continue improving something that's already finished ? You don't, because it's f*cking done! So what's else to do than just randomly screw with things. This is also seen in Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Windows operating systems.

I switched to Mate when they made the first major screwup, but eventually Mate got bloated too for no good reason, back to XFCE, but they also can't keep their hands off of it.

So here I am in i3, which is not really what I'd prefer, but at least they don't seem to have the same itch to constantly change stuff just to change it.

Here's how software _SHOULD_ work: Develop it until it's _DONE_ and _STOP_. Now, you ONLY submit code that makes it run faster and use less memory. Otherwise, just stop, move on and make something else.