Have you actually used vanilla Gnome? I did it fairly recently. Gnome 46 is like a fridge. It has fewer graphically exposed settings than Windows 95. I literally had to install a program to scale my wallpaper. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I understand this is a forum for programmers, but it's unrealistic to expect real users to manipulate a program like that by rewriting its source code, or even through dconf.