To be completely fair to Gnome, they're doing some stuff that nobody else is doing. The idea of building an entire desktop off the backs of C and the gobject system is very novel and gives Gnome a lot of advantages. For example, it had binding for just about every language under the sun. Compare that to KDE and Qt, which is C++ or bust.

Obviously it's a bit hacky and kind of a mess, but it is technically interesting.