After all this years I still think the Applications - Places - System "start menu" was the best way to present available stuff in a DE, in any DE, in any OS, ever. You didn't have to skim through so many submenus to locate something - the main categories were available at a glance. It was pure genius.

I kind of get why they felt pressured to remove it but pretty much every other DE had a start-menu-like thing and they never did any change. It was just GNOME.