Ah, the good old gnome drama. They consider users , stupid and make their system as stupid as possible and never let the user to do advance customization as they please. Their gate keeping nature back fired I guess.
In their defense, users are stupid and that's why Linux and FreeBSD haven't yet replaced Windows. I recommend GNOME to inexperienced users, and they actually like it and find it intuitive. It accelerates Linux and FreeBSD adoption, which automatically improves the entire freedesktop ecosystem, nobody can deny that. No matter what drama happens, at the end of the day, almost all our distros can run the same apps natively, making every improvement for one a direct or indirect improvement for all.